Blind (wine] tasting/testing of acoustic guitars

sev112

The quality / tone / value of acoustic guitars is very subjective to the individual player and listener, and also the environment.  And the year of manufacture. 

We have similar aspects in wine.  And every year there are blind tastings where you get say 30 wine professionals (tasters, critics, makers, drinkers etc) who all taste lots and lots of different wines blind and rank them. And they award points and prizes and the awards are highly valuable to the manufacturers.

would be interesting for something similar for acoustic guitars - would have to be real blindfolds.  


also lots of similarities with vintage wine as vintage guitars - I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a thread on a wine forum saying that some dealer had traded a chateau Laffite for a Margaux and a more modern Pinot Noir, but I turned out the Laffite was fake, but that the OP had already offered the Laffite to someone else on the wine forum 2 years ago. Perhaps  

Kittyfrisk

Many interesting studies have been carried out, yet most guitarists still prefer to make up their own minds  
https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.5084735
https://newatlas.com/guitar-wood-types/58139/

Have fun finding the sound you want  

sev112

Thanks, I shall give those a read

my thoughts were more about what the player(s);thought we’re the best guitars irrespective of the maker and wood type .  But yes I guess finding the sound that one likes is basically that

jellyroll

A blindfold wouldn't hinder me. I can differentiate mine by their smell.

stickyfiddle

sev112 said:

also lots of similarities with vintage wine as vintage guitars - I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a thread on a wine forum saying that some dealer had traded a chateau Laffite for a Margaux and a more modern Pinot Noir, but I turned out the Laffite was fake, but that the OP had already offered the Laffite to someone else on the wine forum 2 years ago. Perhaps  

Just to be clear, I lolled for this bit

It would be a very interesting exercise. I'm quite sure I'm incapable of being entirely objective about a guitar's sound, but I'm ok with it. 

I did once fall in love with the sound of a walnut J45, but it was a horrible poo-brown-burst with gold hardware and I could never have coped with having it in my house

DavidR

I would love to see a graph where the x axis is 'blind testing of tone expressed as a percentage' and the y axis is 'price'.

Would the 2 correlate? Who are the outliers? Would brands perform as brands, or would they include good and bad?

But then, as others have said, tone ain't the only thing. Comfort and lovability matter too. But it would still be interesting. You would need a massive sample size to counter the subjective nature of the x axis.

My guess is that, in 2022, price would correlate with tone, but poorly. Individuals can, with minimal work, find an acoustic with good tone at a low cost. As has often been said, compared with the acoustic choice in the 1970's, we are lucky little bunnies.

:-)

bermudianbrit

As I am actually blind, I have done this when purchasing guitars, asking the guy in the shop not to tell me which guitar I'm playing as long as its within budget. This caused me to reject some surprising instruments I might otherwise have psychologically preferred, like the Martin Eric Clapton, which I played for all of 90 seconds before moving on, even though I was...playing an Eric Clapton song to test it lol.

Blind tests are fascinating things. I asked Andertons once if they wanted an actual blind guy to come over and do a testing series with them...the title could be "No Blindfold Required". Although I later found that that this same title is used for a blind-only BDSM group, so perhaps not as salubrious as I had first thought...
Anyway, interesting thread.

bertie

sev112 said:

The quality / tone / value of acoustic guitars is very subjective to the individual player

as are feel/playability and aesthetics equally so

Pjon

jellyroll said:

A blindfold wouldn't hinder me. I can differentiate mine by their smell.

Is that because you dropped wine over one while blind testing?  

Pjon

On the food side of things, when I was in uni doing a food  based degree, we did an experiment where we gave a variety of ice-creams to victims subjects. Most couldn't tell that the pink ice-cream wasn't strawberry, but was vanilla with red colouring in. Their brains couldn't separate the colour from the taste.

I'm not suggesting that people lick guitars btw.