A similar story is often told about really old violins.

I thought that was debunked, that in "blind" tests experts nearly always selected modern, high end violins over the Stradivarius's (Stradivarii?).

That is sort of what I meant. The idea that ancient violins hold an unattainable mystique. That is now just an investment vehicle.

I violated HN guidelines by being too flippant in my answer.

Which Stradivarius? He made many, some better than others. Also, which modern violin - there are many makers who make theirs sound different, and of course each violin from the same maker will have their own sound.

That is really the point. The fact of who made the violin is much easier to conceptualize and communicate than any of it’s acoustic properties.

That won't stop people from telling the story. Wine is the same way.

I disagree. In a blind test I can absolutely tell which application is running natively on Windows.

Wine, the beverage.

I think you missed the joke.

But to get back on topic I’m not sure I get how wine is the same.

Wine is a product with large taste variations between the different regions and vine varieties. Plus depending of the year you will again have variations in the grapes which can be more or less balanced during the fabrication.

Some producers are known to have produced particularly great wine some specific years which lead to say bottles being very expensive but most of it is very much fact based.

The only dubious thing I see in wine is that the way aging changes the taste of a bottle is not an improvement indefinitely. At some point the wine just gets worst and the search for very old bottle is mostly posturing.

Yes, and that's common knowledge among most musicians nowadays. Sure, it's hard to be a musician -- amateur or professional -- and not also be an enthusiast. And I don't think very many violinists would turn down a chance to try a Strad, or at least hold it and look at it.

There's still an open question about whether the new fiddles are better, or that the old ones are deteriorating, or both.

Disclosure: Working double bassist. And don't get me started about bows. ;-)

French bows or German bows? Just so we know what not to get you started on.

I play French. I played cello as a kid, and when I started bass lessons in college, my teacher played German but told me there was no reason for me to switch. Most teachers have a preference but can teach either one. I've seen great bassists play both. There's a slight preference towards German for adult beginners because the learning curve isn't as steep.

Deeply check out the story of Steinway if you respect their instruments.

It's not publicized but there was a documentary about how they almost lost far too much of their raw abilities gained since the 19th century when it comes to institutional knowledge which had always been essential to the way they had made pianos in a less-then-fully documented way, that had been passed on through generations.

Most likely some of the most talented builders at earlier times were not very literate with paperwork anyway.

The modern company dropped the ball for quite a while through attrition, until an urgent effort was undertaken to preserve what they had and uncover any little tidbits that were inadvertently lost. A lot of careful measurements were taken like never before, and documentation produced.

I doubt if the pianos are the same, but don't think I would be able to tell the difference either.

This page has some excellent little videos itself:

https://www.steinway.com/news/features/inside-the-new-york-c...

I think there is a Jean shepherd story about his apprenticeship spent in a harp or piano factory. I think the arc is he started out lost and hating it, finally started to like it and then they chose to keep the other kid they hired.

So he was left unsure how he felt.

> and can be learned again in the future

Maybe? You’re assuming that someone between now and whenever humanity ends will have the time and resources to rediscover it. I’m not sure I’d take that bet.

> "The “best” had to be discovered and learned, and can be learned again in the future, even if the present chain of knowledge dies out."

If the Boeing Effect is anything to go by, I don't think that assumption can hold in the short/medium term. Yes, maybe a century from now we'd have some set of pressures and alignment of various incentives such that we rebuild/rediscover this lost knowledge. But it'll be bleak until then, and we can't rely on it to happen in our generation.

But I'd go further and argue it's deeper. Sometimes it's not just about any one single "node" being lost. The network of nodes and the unique connections and weights between them will forever be gone.

To borrow yet another saying/aphorism. "It's much easier to destroy something than to build it."

> The “best” had to be discovered and learned, and can be learned again in the future

Only if the conditions required for re-discovery occur in the future. Those conditions may include things like a thriving world market in high-performance acoustic pianos, the need to have only the best pianos played at court, the need for one king to be or appear wealthier than another king etc. Acoustic pianos may never be that important to humanity again, so it's not clear we'll recover all information we gained when they were.

Archeologists often try to reconstruct ancient practices. Although modern humans have the advantage of a much larger basis of knowledge, it's not always trivial nor even always possible to reconstruct old ideas.

Learning is a feedback loop process. Whether you can recover knowledge depends on how successfully you can replicate the feedback loop. And that depends on ambient factors.