The instrument’s biggest difficulty is simultaneously its greatest joy – to make a sweet sound you must relax ...

Ex-movie theater projectionist Steve Guttenberg has also worked as a high-end audio salesman, and as a record producer. Steve reviewed audio products for CNET and worked as a freelance writer for ...

Violin makers routinely finish their instruments with a thick coat of varnish, the better to protect and preserve the wood. Now Swiss scientists claim that this varnish also plays a role in the ...

Milan, 6 May 2022 - What makes the sound of one violin preferable to that of another? Do some Stradivarius violins really have a special sound? To answer these questions, a multidisciplinary team ...

A good violin depends on the expertise of the violin maker, but also on the quality of the wood that is used. Professor Francis W. M. R. Schwarze of th Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science ...

Leonardo da Vinci's oil painting "Mona Lisa" looks rather gloomy with its dark green and brown colours. It is a little-known fact that the maestro painted the picture in bright colours - so the ...

For centuries, violin makers have tried and failed to reproduce the pristine sound of Stradivarius and Guarneri violins, but after 33 years of work put into the project, one professor is confident the ...

What: A fascinating video that demonstrates the difference in sound quality between an extremely affordable violin, and one that costs as much as beachfront property. Who: YouTube violinist Rob Landes ...

Why do the violins made by Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù sound so good? Countless theories have been proposed for the secret of these eighteenth-century Italian instrument-makers, but attempts to ...

A dose of rot can make for a better-sounding violin, say Swiss researchers who have used fungal infections to change the acoustic properties of wood. The treatments make the wood less dense, and have ...