That myth has been perpetuated for decades, and as historical information has been uncovered and experiments have shown, there was nothing special about the finishes used by Stradivarius or others. Many years ago, I believed that it could hold some of the answers, but as it turns out, there is no truth to the matter.
Cool - great stuff!!
I figured that if several folks were pursuing different instrument finishes that they were significant. Hm, do you think they engaged in this dialogue solely for marketing?
Dave
Dave,
Sorry, I totally missed giving you an answer.
I don't know of anyone other than a few individuals actively pursuing different finishes in efforts to heighten the performance of instruments. If there was a true performance gain, musical instrument manufacturers would want to know about it. It's a very competitive market out there, and for expensive instruments, the clients are well educated, and very picky about sound.
Where the origins of the Stradivarius finish myth started, I don't know, but one could speculate that it dates back many generations, when there was no science to explain why there would be so much difference between the sound produced by a Strad vs. another seemingly similar contemporary violin. Violins are small, fragile, very lightweight instruments. Their soundboards are thin and very resonant. One might theorize that they are of similar dimensions and construction, similar woods, what else would be a variable? Finishes were not store bought pre made back then, they were mixed from individual resins, binders, and solvents by the person applying them. It's been discovered that the Strads were finished with the same finishes that furniture makers were using in that area of Italy at the time. Nothing special.
Legends and myths are easy to perpetuate when knowledge of something is beyond the average persons general knowledge.
As a youngster, I even thought that the finish might be a very important factor in the sound of acoustic instruments, but as I have accumulated many instruments myself, I have learned that differences in sonic characteristics, pitches and resonances have more to do with the inhomogeneous aspects of wood. That is the huge variable, not the finish.
Another example. My brother is a drummer. He's been playing since we were kids. He's owned a number of drum kits. As a result, I also play drums. He's owned a number of drum kits. We use to have a rehearsal space. I also played with other musicians as well. We would sometimes have his 2 drum kits, and another drummers drum kits in the same room. Drums sound very different. Even same sizes shells, with identical heads.
Double bass drum kits are very interesting. The two kick drums
rarelysound the same. It's usually bim/bom/bim/bom. Never bom/bom/bom/bom. Drummers usually have a preference for one over the other as the main kick drum. Considering their method of construction, I still to this day have a hard time understanding how there could be such a difference.
DW Drums actually goes to added effort of stamping the inside of their shells with a pitch reference. So that they can match bass drums, and in the event of one needing to be replaced, the owner can be somewhat guaranteed that the replacment will be very similar sounding to the one it is replacing and will be a good match.
My brothers current drums are Yamaha Custom Power Recording. They are birch shells. The bass drums ( 24"x 18")were custom made as they are not a stock item, even from the manufacturer. They arrived together 3 months after the other shells. They were manufactured together. They
do not sound the same. At all. We tried everything possible, and there is no way to make them sound similar. It's actually very frustrating and disappointing. I have recorded his drums many times and have his whole drum kit recorded as digital samples in my samplers.
How does this relate to speakers? Simple. Crossovers are designed and tested on a speaker in an enclosure. The crossover is then refined and measured, listened to, and evaluated, and revoiced if necessary. If you now change the properties of the enclosure, it could make quite a difference in the performance of the speaker. With MDF, it's a homogeneous product. There isn't going to be a huge difference from one board to another. With wood, the differences are going to be huge. Even from one board to the other, even from the same tree. That's the reality. With real wood, it would be a moving target. You could never feel confident that there would be any consistency.
People go to great lengths to match tolerances of tweeters, resistors, caps, inductors to very small values and percentages. It's virtually impossible to do anything resembling that with wood.
As far as using wooden pieces under equipment, you would have to have consistency of resonances to convince me about their efficacy. If you used 3 footers under a component and they happened to have resonant frequencies of C,C#,D, well that's 3 notes that are apart by one semitone. That's dissonance. Play those 3 keys together on a piano and it doesn't sound very harmonious. And this is going to add beautifully to a components performance?
To say I'm skeptical of that, is an understatement.
If
anything, because of the fact that the cellular structure of wood is basically a stack of tubes, wood in the application of footers and so on, would probably act more like a decoupler/absorber/isolator. A subtractive element, not an additive one.
Cheers
