[5String43]

Well, maybe. Man, this is a sexy subject. This question of why Stradivari's instruments - he built violins, violas and cellos - sound the way they do has driven scientists and musicians crazy for a long time.

Part of the deal with Strads is the wood itself, and that goes beyond density. There is a lot of conjecture that the best of the Strads - and some of them are quite different from the rest, from what I've read - were built from wood that apparently had been under water for a long period of time. Apparently immersion does something to the wood's cells that exposure to air doesn't. As an example, a luthier named Richard Hoover, who owns Santa Cruz Guitars, is building some spectacular instruments using a sycamore stump, I think it was, he'd obtained after it had been dredged out of a bay somewhere. Additionally, the late Tony Pass was building spectacular banjo rims for Stelling banjos, called "Lost Timber," I think, from wood that had been submerged in one of the Great Lakes for a century. So just matching the density and dimensions is only part of the problem.

Additionally, using tiny tools called thumb planes, Stradivari would have individually graduated each piece of wood, especially the tops of his instruments, making them just as thick as his ear told him to when he rapped knuckles on them - or did something like that to let the wood tell him how it would resonate. The kind of standardization represented here is fine for furniture and cheap guitars, but not for something trying to emulate a Strad.

Also, there's the issue of finish. People have driven themselves nuts trying to match the exact finish - I think it's a varnish, but I'm not sure - that he used. And to apply it, he probably would have used a labor-intensive and time-comsuming technique called French polish.

And then there's the matter of the glues old Stradivari used. There are a couple of as-new Strads around, so I'd imagine we have a pretty good idea how to recreate those.

In any case, I don't think that everything can be boiled down to science and technology. Somehow, the notion of genius has to be factored in.

For more on this, see a really excellent book called "Stradivari's Genius," by Toby Farr.

All this said, I suspect these new copies are really excellent. I'd love to hold one, and hear one.