Cards on the table.
I am a retired product designer - I used to call myself a technologist rather than an engineer because the latter term is often misunderstood, but it’s safe to say that I have managed chemists, metallurgists and engineers.
I cited the wonderful one hoss shay above because it actually represents the perfection of product design - a product that works throughout its entire design life without needing anything but the easy maintenance of parts subject to wear, and as few of those as possible. I could go on about this at length but it would rapidly become tedious.
From a design point of view, classical musical instruments are failures. Important parts wear out, there is no proper control of materials, no proper documentation. In fact, there isn’t even a specification. Looking at investigations of 18th century violins, for instance, I don’t think we know whether the metallic traces found are preservatives or intended to produce a certain tone (I suspect the former). Yet a whole cottage industry has grown up around preserving them at vast cost and they command extremely high prices.
We don’t really know for certain what they sounded like when new and we don’t really know how composers felt about the noises they made. One thing we do know is that 18th and early 19th century musicians were much less precious about various aspects of performance than classical musicians tend to be today.
If classical music was really about performance quality then instead of preserving antique instruments, new ones would be developed using modern technology. Oh, they are! Japanese manufacturers produce violins which are robust, reliable, designed for long life and which cannot be distinguished in true double blind tests from antique instruments.
I have no problem with people who want to play antique instruments and who want to maintain a Veblen goods market in them, but pretending that this is about musical quality is surely pure snobbery (and keeping the wrong, i.e. lower class, people out because they can’t afford instruments that meet the requirements of orchestras, even amateur ones.)
Of course I can be dismissed as an ignoramus, and my comments as uninformed ramblings. But during the period I was teaching, I was at schools which had something of a musical tradition - one associated with a major cathedral - and the staff of the music departments had rather robust attitudes to “antique” instruments, regarding them as an amusing affectation like people who restore old cars. I can’t help wondering if the reverence for the old has held back the development of better, more robust instruments that go out of tune less readily, and whether modern CAD and FEA wouldn’t lead to things that had generally better and more consistent response. I’m not talking electric guitars here, for instance, but the use of new materials and material testing to produce better acoustic ones.
