Violin string review comparison: 27 sets, 1 piece of music

0:00 Thomastik Dynamo
0:36 Thomastik Dominant
1:10 Thomastik Dominant Pro
1:44 Thomastik Infeld Red
2:19 Thomastik Vision Titanium Orchestra
2:52 Thomastik Vision Titanium Solo
3:28 Thomastik Vision Solo
4:04 Thomastik Vision
4:40 Thomastik Ti
5:15 Thomastik Rondo
5:48 Thomastik Peter Infeld
6:22 Pirastro Evah Pirazzi
6:55 Pirastro Evah Pirazzi Gold
7:30 Pirastro Passione
8:06 Pirastro Oliv
8:38 Pirastro Perpetual Cadenza
9:10 Pirastro Obligato
9:44 Pirastro Violino
10:18 Pirastro Tonica
10:53 Warchal Karneol
11:27 Warchal Amber
11:59 Warchal Timbre
12:35 D’Addario Pro Arte
13:10 Corelli Crystal
13:46 Larsen Original
14:22 Larsen Virtuoso
14:58 Larsen Tzigane

For my personal review of those sets of strings, see the blog post on violinist.com: https://bit.ly/27strings_review

I bought all tested sets in 2022/2023 and played them for at least three days (most sets were played for one week or longer). In 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). Those first 12 recordings were already published on Youtube (https://bit.ly/12strings) and discussed in a blog post on violinist.com (https://bit.ly/12strings_review). Here, I added another 15 sets of strings, recorded in April 2023 using the same procedure:

After changing to each new set of strings, I played for roughly 30 min before recording (I recorded up to four different sets per day). To get the strings in tune quickly, I played a few full strokes of the bow on each string close to the bridge (see https://bit.ly/string-break-in). 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).