[bluesky]

Well, I thought it a pretty innocent question but after reading everything I think it's really a matter of build the stuff and see what happens.

However, having said all that I will be building my 1801's with veneered MDF and the equipment shelves with matching timber.  I know a local carpenter who has a couple of suppliers who are retired carpenter/joiners who have stored timber and these have been air drying and aging for years.  My carpenter friend told me they only release this wood for specific projects that they think are worthy items to use this wood and my friend thinks my speaker project is one that would appeal to these two chaps.

So I will see what comes about and post on it should this happen with the end results.

Thanks for all the information but it does seem, like so many areas in audio, to be very subjective and, at the end of the day, as long as I feel happy with the results, then it will be worthwhile.

One last important point to make, is that if it looks good, then it sounds better as a result.  A kind of audio placebo effect if you like!

Bluesky

[wildfire99]

Heck, I think it's time we got a Strad and a well-built contemporary clone in the same room and put the player behind a curtain. The player can randomly pick up a violin and play a short piece, and a listener group can try to guess which one is which. Will they hear a difference?

The Great Violin A/B/X Test:

Tester #1: "They all sounded like screeching cats to me."
Tester #2: "Clearly, Violin B had the rich air and deep, punchy transients of a master instrument." (Violin B was the modern clone.)
Tester #3: "The test was unscientific, because the player did not use the same bow for each violin."
Tester #4: "The Strad had slightly more body and a cleaner decay, but the difference was obvious." (Chose the Strad correctly only 70% of the time.)
Tester #5: (Passed out on beer before the tests were done.)

Conclusion: Go out in the sunshine and play frisbee or something.

[BrianM]

Heck, I think it's time we got a Strad and a well-built contemporary clone in the same room and put the player behind a curtain. The player can randomly pick up a violin and play a short piece, and a listener group can try to guess which one is which. Will they hear a difference?

The Great Violin A/B/X Test:

Tester #1: "They all sounded like screeching cats to me."
Tester #2: "Clearly, Violin B had the rich air and deep, punchy transients of a master instrument." (Violin B was the modern clone.)
Tester #3: "The test was unscientific, because the player did not use the same bow for each violin."
Tester #4: "The Strad had slightly more body and a cleaner decay, but the difference was obvious." (Chose the Strad correctly only 70% of the time.)
Tester #5: (Passed out on beer before the tests were done.)

Conclusion: Go out in the sunshine and play frisbee or something.

Heh.

Nobody'll disagree that the differences between a Stradivarius and a modern violin must be "subjective" and that listeners will be unequally attuned to them, but...it's worth at least remembering that for the most part what makes a Strad really sound like a Strad is the player, not the wood.  The tonal advantage is latent and must be coaxed out of the instrument by an expert violinist.  A built-in advantage, definitely (open strings may resonate better than other violins) but still a high threshold to getting all 2 million bucks out of your violin.  To the extent the analogy between a violin and a loudspeaker holds any water, it's fair to say just picking the best wood won't get you very far.  (Conversely, a great player can make a shitty violin sound pretty darn good.)  It's also worth remembering that the consensus about Stradivarius violins was/is driven by the players, who have the most acute ears for their own instruments.  And if everyone from Paganini to Itzhak Perlman insists on playing a Strad it's wise to defer to their judgment on the matter.  (And not that their aren't other makes, like Guarneri del Gesu, with comparable reputations.) And of course many imitations/replicas of these old violins have been made: if they were as tonally successful as the old ones the top players wouldn't likely keep shelling out for the real thing.  I guess I'm saying that whether or not Joe Sixpack hears the difference is kinda beside the point.  There are qualified people who do.

Secondly, there are undeniably real physical reasons for the differences in tone.  Just because people aren't sure precisely what they are doesn't make it "voodoo."  A violin isn't a complicated piece of electronics, but any physical phenomenon depending on so many variables (the interrelationship between the player, his bow, the violin's strings & soundboard, the acoustic and the human ear) would produce an unbelievably complex prospect for "white paper" analysis.  It can't be denied that, just as in audio equipment, minute differences in a violin's design will produce real differences in sound.  The fact that a specific set of violins from a specific time and location in history produced a different result certainly plays up this fact.  All that being said, the wood in a violin is (obviously) *directly* involved in the sound -- the soundboard is made of wood -- while the wood in a speaker is certainly not -- the "soundboard" is the cone driver.  So how anyone can speak of instrumental wood in the same or similar light as speaker wood is beyond me.  But it isn't fair to dismiss what expert listeners hear in different violins as "unscientific" if you won't in turn do the same thing vis a vis audio components and speakers.  There's really no such thing as a reliable "scientific" judgment of either category of sound reproduction, but good ears still reliably hear the differences.

And as far as I can tell, an analogy between a violin and a source component doesn't actually exist.

[Daygloworange]

it's worth at least remembering that for the most part what makes a Strad really sound like a Strad is the player, not the wood.  The tonal advantage is latent and must be coaxed out of the instrument by an expert violinist.

A violin isn't a complicated piece of electronics, but any physical phenomenon depending on so many variables (the interrelationship between the player, his bow, the violin's strings & soundboard, the acoustic and the human ear) would produce an unbelievably complex prospect for "white paper" analysis.

This is absolute fact. The player is the largest variable. The way each player attacks the strings is very different. Where he bows the string along it's length, how much pressure he applies with the bow while he draws it, how much pressure he hits the string with as he bows are very important events in the timbre of the note the violin will produce.

A direct analogy is a drum. A snare drum for example is a simple instrument. There are many different sounds that a snared drum can make. They are very sensitive to velocity, stick weight, the stick tip material, angle of strike, location of strike, duration of strike. All these different elements will affect the attack, timber, resonance, fundamental pitch, pitch modulation, overtone, amplitude and duration of the note a snare drum produces. Despite the fact that it is tuned to a fixed note, it's a very complex sounding instrument.

If you listen to an experienced drummer hit 4 evenly spaced consecutive hits in as similar a fashion and location as he can, it will appear to sound the same at the time you are listening to it. If you were to take those 4 hits and record them (in a digital sampler for example) edit and isolate each hit, then trigger them closely side by side and compare the strikes, they would in fact be all different. Often it's the first and last strikes that are the most different.

I learned this over 15 years ago when I first began using digital samplers. There are a complex set of parameters to edit recorded sounds with after a sound has been sampled, in order to make them sound more as if a human were playing the sounds, and not a machine simply triggering recorded samples.

There are amplitude, attack, envelope, slope, filters, pitch, layers, crossfades, mulitsamples, modulation parameters to name a few that must be used in order to add the randomness of different elements a human player makes in the sound of a performance and timbre of a certain instrument. Drums are very sensitive to these parameters. As are stringed instruments (they are probably the most difficult actually). A very simple instrument is a harpsichord. It is a very simple instrument to reproduce because of the fact it has very little in the way of human variation. It is a plucked instrument, as opposed to a hammered instrument like the piano. It has basically two events. Note on, and note off. You can't play a note softly (per se) on a harpsichord. It's attack is very consistant, and therefore variations of all the elements that shape the timbre of a note event are all but eliminated.

What the elements are that shape how sounds are made from instruments is a fascinating and complex topic. Much too complex to try and summarize here, but very, very real, and very, very complex. Even a simple drum.

The best and easiest description so that people might get a sense of what kind of difference these elements might make in terms of sound is this example.

If one were to digitally sample a single snare drum shot, trim the sample, edit it for proper velocity sensitivity and amplitude, even add a certain amount of LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) to add randomness to the playback pitch, you would have a certain randomness being played back. The triggered sample is different than the stored sample. The triggered one has all the parameters acting upon it according to the way it is triggered. You assign parameters to elements of velocity, duration, aftertouch of a triggering of a sample.

If you were to trigger the sound numerous times, people would definitely hear differences between the (triggered) samples.
If how ever you were to try and play the sample very close together to simulate a double stroke roll on a snare drum, it would sound like a series of very closely spaced echoes. It would sound that same way machine gun fire sounds like. Tat,tat,tat,tat,tat,tat.....If you were to play back the samples very,very close together to try a simulate a flam, you would get a huge phase cancellation and the sound would be full of comb filtering and flanging.

The only way to try and have it sound anywhere close to what it sounds like in reality would be to have 3 or 4 different samples (like the 4 shots we had our pro drummer play earlier) edited like I described earlier. If you would then play back the samples in random patterns in order to try and simulate sixteenth note figures, rolls, and flams, it would come very, very close (for all intents and purposes, virtually real)to sounding as if they were really being played in actuality by a real drummer and not a machine triggering a series of samples. Snare rolls would sound more like ta,ti,ta,to,tit,ta,tat,to....more randomness and very human.

Cheers

[wildfire99]

And as far as I can tell, an analogy between a violin and a source component doesn't actually exist.

I know, I've never heard a Strad anyway. It was just meant as a clever way of demonstrating how you can attribute subjective measurement factors to pretty much anything, because the human mind has a natural requirement to create hierarchies for things. The mind just can't have Part A be the same as Part B, there must be some reason A > B, or vice-versa.

Maybe it's the wood, maybe it's the wires, maybe it's the fish-oil capacitors... something is different, right? 
There's that, and even if you do prove something to be equivalent using an ABX test, people will still demand that there are differences. I meant no disrespect to your instrument. I once tried to take up the violin but soon decided that I liked my fingertips too much to subject them to that kind of abuse.

The original reference of dried cellulose fibers in proximity to solid state electronics was the funny part. They're big on that in China I hear.

[KS]

Australian woods and others compared to Canadian Rock Maple:
http://www.overspianos.com.au/wdprp.html