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The short answer and the long answer to this question is the sound of the violin. The short answer is best illustrated by a story related to me by our Luthier. He has over 50 years of experience and has attended hundreds of Luthiery conventions and has lectured at many of them. He told me that there are no liars at Luthier conventions. He went further to explain that presenters can show their nicest violins. They can lecture on techniques and show off the most beautiful of woods and engraving on a violin. Their violin can look pretty. It can have taken hours and weeks and months to prepare it. However, it all comes down to that moment when the player puts the bow to the strings and makes music. The violin can be the most beautiful violin ever made but if it sounds like shit, it is worthless. It is just that simple. You can have a violin appraisal done at your local luthiery.

The long answer to this question is that there are degrees of quality and then there is always personal preference as sound is a very subjective judgment as to what is pleasing to the ear. There seems to be a standard that has been set from the time violins were perfected. The sound of the Stradivarius is the standard for most trained ears. However, depending on the type of music to be played and how the instrument feels to the player, some prefer instruments of the designs of other masters such as the Amati or Guarnerius family designs or those of Maggini.

Degrees of quality depend on the quality of the wood and then the talent and knowledge of construction techniques of the maker of the violin. The wood used by Stradivarius in making his violins is legendary in that no one has been able to duplicate his process for finding the right wood and then treating it with the right processes to achieve the same result on a consistent basis. Of course his were all hand made. As the factory process was applied to the making of violins, more violins were made and more diverse maple and spruce forests were harvested. This is evident in the variety of grains of the maple in the masters’ copies that were produced from the middle of the 19th century up until the start of the 20th century. There are millions of examples still circulating. What sorts them out is the test of time on the wood and how well they were made. Some cottage factories and later, the mass production factories varied greatly in the thoroughness of their construction techniques. The quality ranges from some very bad cottage factory made violins to the very nice Wolff Brothers violin mass produced at the turn of the century. Violin making then moved to where the labour was cheaper so in the 20th century factories migrated from Europe to Japan to China.

I have witnessed a lot of violin playing on a wide quality range of violins. I have been blessed with watching some very talented young violinists play our instruments. When they play the best players play the best instruments, you can see them go to that special place that musicians go where all they see and feel is the music. It is joyful to watch and for the violinist it is the soul of the experience of playing. The better the sound, the more blissful the experience is for the player and the listener. And that very simply is where the value lays in violins.

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