Steve Guttenberg, in his excellent c/net High-end audio blog, the Audiophiliac, writes about his visit to the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center in East Hampton, New York. In touring the house, he discovered Pollock’s stereo setup, including a Bogen DB-20 tube amplifier.
There are some 650 surviving violins made by Antonio Stradivari. Their exceptional beauty in form and function — and their high prices — have brought them worldwide renown and their own names. (Itzhak Perlman acquired “Soil” from Yehudi Menuhin for $1.25 million. Heifetz played “Dolphin,” and “Lady Tennant” brought $2 million last year at auction.)
What makes these violins so different from others? Music lovers and scientists have been working to solve this mystery for nearly 300 years. And now it looks like it comes down to a bit of bad weather.
Scientisits at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands tweaked a computer program used to analyze scans measuring lung density in patients with emphysema to get a highly detailed look at microstructure structure of the violins’ wood.
Lead author and violinist, Dr. Berend Stoel put five of the classic instruments and seven modern violins through acomputed tomographic (CT) scanner. The research, published Wednesday in the online journal PLoS ONE, states that they found the classic violins to have a more consistent wood thickness and density throughout the growth rings. This structure would influence how vibrations travel through the wood.
It is thought that a mini European ice age in the 1600s might have helped to keep the growth rings consistent by eliminating the variation caused by faster growth during summer.
