Originally Posted by
sblock
Ah, the madness of human perception! We manage to fool ourselves all the time, and that's a fact. If you happen to believe that something will change the tone of your instrument, then it absolutely, positively will. From your perspective, that is. Not necessarily from the perspective of an unbiased observer, and not necessarily from the perspective of a measuring device, either. Most owner reports are simply untrustworthy. And this goes for luthiers as well as players.
The past pages of the MC are full of insistent claims that something like an armrest, or a ToneGard, or a tailpiece, or replacing the tuners dramatically changed the tone or volume of an instrument. But unlike the components like bridges, strings, soundboards, and suchlike, these types of accessories are specifically designed NOT to affect tone. On the contrary: they're deliberately designed to exert minimal effects, usually by clamping to the very rim of the instrument itself, where -- due to the instrument geometry and verified by scientific measurements -- there are vibrational nodes that exhibit the least amounts of displacement when the instrument is played.
Could small differences in tone or volume nevertheless exist when an armrest or Tonegard is attached? Yes, of course they could! Absolutely ANYTHING at all that changes the geometry, mass, stiffness, or damping of an acoustical musical instrument will necessarily change its sound profile. That's physics. But it comes down to a matter of how much, exactly.
I'd contend that the breathless accounts we so often get that an instrument sounds significantly different with a new tailpiece, armrest, or ToneGard are simply not credible. After all, folks fool themselves all the time. It's not that they're stupid or delusional. On the contrary, it's just that they're human. They want to hear a difference, and so they do.
In medicine, the bedside manner of a doctor counts for a great deal. If he or she conveys confidence to you that your condition will improve, then the chances are better that it will do so. And if you're treated with a drug -- even a placebo -- your chances at improving are also significantly better. The placebo effect is so incredibly strong, in fact, that up to 30% or more of patients treated (without their knowledge) by sugar pills will report doing better than patients receiving no drug treatment at all. All modern medical tests have to be designed with such placebo effects in mind.
We should be properly skeptical of claims that go against our physical and musical intuitions. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. I absolutely believe the OP when he reports hearing a difference with and without the ToneGard. That's what he experiences, after all, and I have no reason to doubt it. But I question whether the same difference can be reliably detected by anyone else, for example, in a recording where the listener is unaware of the presence or absence of the ToneGard.
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