Can you tell the difference between a million-dollar Stradivari and a violin by a modern maker? Following their 2014 study that found violin soloists unable to tell Stradivari violins from modern instruments at better than chance levels, a team of researchers has published a paper on audience responses to the violins.

Written by French acoustic specialists Claudia Fritz and Jacques Poitevineau, as well as violin maker Joseph Curtin and strings expert Fan-Chia Tao – who co-founded and co-direct the Violin Society of America Oberlin Acoustics Workshop – the paper, titled Listener evaluations of new and Old Italian violins and published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States website, sought to extend the results of the 2014 study to listeners in a hall.

“Old Italian violins are widely believed to have playing qualities unobtainable in new violins, including the ability to project their sound more effectively in a hall. Because Old Italian instruments are now priced beyond the reach of the vast majority of players, it seems important to test the fundamental assumption of their tonal superiority,” the authors wrote.

The team performed two separate experiments in which three new violins were compared...