IT'S ESPECIALLY SILLY TO GIVE PEOPLE MORE CHOICES...:

Joseph Curtin, a violin-maker from Michigan, was one of the researchers. "There was no evidence that people had any idea what they were playing," he says. "That really surprised me."

Curtin says of the 17 players who were asked to choose which were old Italians, "Seven said they couldn't, seven got it wrong, and only three got it right."

Claudia Fritz designed the experiment. She's an acoustics physicist from France's National Center for Scientific Research -- and a flute player, by the way. She says this test was more rigorous than previous ones because it was "double-blind" -- no one knew which instrument was which until after the test. That rules out the kind of bias that might creep in when a musician judges an instrument he or she knows is 300 years old and maybe played by someone like Fritz Kreisler or Henryk Szeryng.

And this experiment asked seasoned violin players, not listeners, to choose.

Fritz says some of the players told her they were certain which were the new violins and which were the old Italians.

"'Ah, it's just a bit too new for me'," she recalled one musician saying. "And it was a Strad. Another one said, 'Ah, I love the sound of this one, it really has the sound of an old Italian, ah, just so warm.' And it was a brand new violin. "

When Fritz asked the players which violins they'd like to take home, almost two-thirds chose a violin that turned out to be new. She's found the same in tests with other musical instruments. "I haven't found any consistency whatsoever," she says. "Never. People don't agree. They just like different things."

In fact, the only statistically obvious trend in the choices was that one of the Stradivarius violins was the least favorite, and one of the modern instruments was slightly favored.

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