Violin string comparison: 12 sets, 1 piece of music (link to update to 27 sets below)

Update to 27 tested sets of strings:    • Violin string review comparison: 27 sets, ...  

0:00 Thomastik Dominant
0:35 Thomastik Dominant Pro
1:09 Thomastik Vision Titanium Orchestra
1:42 Thomastik Rondo
2:15 Thomastik Peter Infeld
2:49 Pirastro Evah Pirazzi
3:22 Pirastro Oliv
3:54 Warchal Amber
4:27 Pirastro Perpetual Cadenza
4:59 Larsen Tzigane
5:34 Pirastro Violino
6:08 Pirastro Obligato

For my personal review of those sets of strings, see the blog post on violinist.com: https://bit.ly/12strings_review

To find the best set of strings for my violin, I bought all tested sets in 2022 and played them for at least one week. In early January 2023, I strung my violin again with one set after the other, to record the same piece of music (the first eight bars of Bach’s Sarabande from the second partita for solo violin).

After changing to each new set of strings, I played for roughly 30 min before recording. To get the strings in tune quickly, I used a paper tissue to rub each string until it was warm; I did this three times in the beginning of the 30 min (as recommended on https://bit.ly/quick_break_in; about possible problems with this method, see the discussion section of https://bit.ly/12strings_review).

For each new set of strings, I gently passed my bow across a cake of Cecilia A Piacere rosin twice (once up and down) and then used a toothbrush to clean the bow hairs from too much rosin (see https://bit.ly/brushing_bow_hair; I passed the toothbrush across the bow once).

Recordings were made in the same room, using the same violin, bow, and bow hair, and the inbuilt microphones of a Zoom H4n Pro recorder with the same recording level. I aimed to play fairly consistently (and boringly), using no vibrato at all. Other circumstances that I held as constant as possible included my position in the room and the position of the recorder. I combined the 27 recordings using Audacity but did not otherwise edit the sound in any way. I’m an amateur violinist and bought all sets with my own money, so this was a purely private research project.

A warning: you might need good headphones to hear differences among the sets of strings. The microphones were about 3 meters away from my violin – so what you hear is not the sound directly at the violin, but as it would be perceived by someone sitting in the room (which probably makes it a bit harder to hear differences in sound).