David Burgess

Joerg, I think Jacobs advice was good and well intended, not mean. Learning to plane all sides of a block of wood is such a fundamental and important skill, that many of the violin making schools have students learn to do this well, long before they ever come close to making parts of a violin.

If the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian are in similar situations, the Smithsonian underwent drastic budget cuts a while back. The Smithsonian also has massive numbers of items in storage, already way more than they will ever be able to exhibit, so they routinely decline even items which are offered for free. Taking possession of them would simply increase their expenses.

Sounds like you don't really know much about recording, and various sorts of available post processing available and easily applied these days. I've done a fair bit of recording and processing, with minor consultation with some pretty good recording studio owners and producers. Martin Swan has probably done a lot more. You?

It most certainly can!

Not everyone's. Just fiddlemaker's.

You can thank the recording engineer/producer for that. Can't be certain, but that sure looks like a mic stand about 4 feet in front of Vengerov

If Vengerov is playing his bench copy instead, will it be obvious? Will you know the difference?

Sacconi changed his mind about things quite often. The book is a compilation of snapshots in time of his opinions.

There are so many potential differences between two instruments which are supposedly made the same, that deliberately attempting to introduce even a single variable becomes quite a challenge. If the sample size is large enough, one might notice trends. I routinely make two violins at a time, usually trying to get them to turn out the same. But they do not. So there's that to consider.

Stradivaris don't seem to have any special resistance to distortion. Ask any restorer who has re-arched a few. Careful blind and double-blind studies aren't finding evidence for that, so far. "Confirmation bias" can be a powerful thing.

Yup. Way too much wiggle room and vagueness in the OP's definitions to give any sort of meaningful response.

The heat in the rear luggage compartment of the Fiero wasn't bad at all, even on the one I put a V-8 engine in. It stayed cool enough that I mounted my nitrous bottle there, with no issues. 2600 pound, 550 horsepower car! The Fiero was actually an amazing piece of engineering, a highly advanced car with high performance potential that the engineering team sorta managed to sneak past General Motor's management by pitching it as a "commuter car", and cleverly adapting a lot of off-the-shelf components from other models to keep it within budget. It eventually got it's own high-performance suspension (rather than a suspension shared with "grocery-getter" type cars), but GM pulled the plug shortly thereafter. One of the reasons supposedly was that the engineering team's development cars had gotten to the point that they were faster (and would have been less expensive) than the Corvette, and GM's management and the Corvette team couldn't have that.

Uh oh, highly suspicious! Y'all weren't a bunch of hippies driving out to the Woodstock festival, were you?

Agreed, I was a bit surprised at how judgemental some folks here have been.

I think a bit of color contrast can create some appealing visual effects. Stradivari did it with blackened chamfers and deyed-black strips in the purfling. I don't do the blackened chamfers, but I do darken the ff-hole edges and the inside of the pegbox. Not black by any means, but much darker than the varnish on the rest of the instrument.