My singing teacher started life as a violinist. She's just recently been out to get a new violin, at a slightly snobby music shop in Cambridge. They started taking her seriously when she said "Whichever violin I get, I'm having this bow too". Said bow was carbon fibre and cost £1k...

So she was showing it off, and let me have a go on it. Now I'm not a very good violinist (or fiddler either), but that bow was amazing. For all the talk of "character" above, I'm not totally convinced. As far as I'm concerned, the key quality of a bow (or any part of a musical instrument) is that it does what you want with minimum effort. If it feels like there's no interposing hardware between you and the music, it's a good bit of kit. And that's how that bow was. It was so light that most of your energy was used in moving your hand, and perfectly balanced.

I'm with Bert on this. This carbon fibre bow was made by some bloke in Europe who makes them individually by hand, hence the vast prices. But carbon fibre is actually the perfect material for mass-producing - if he's cracked the structure of the "perfect bow" and got a set of moulds, then the only thing stopping him mass-producing thousands of these bows a year is (a) artificial scarcity maintaining his income, and (b) the stuck-in-the-mud conservatism which infests the instrument business. If he did sell his bow for $200 by mass-producing, you can guarantee no "serious" player would buy it - it's obviously too cheap to be good quality, right...? IMO, I reckon the early starters in mass-production carbon-fibre bows are going to have the last laugh, by repeated fine-tuning until you really won't be able to tell the difference.

Andy, as far as I've heard, Stradivarius *did* turn out some right dogs. But he was an experimental instrument maker, working with what was cutting-edge technology at the time, so it's only to be expected - experiments usually do fail. I'd bet that if he were alive today, he'd be mad as hell with all those people who are still just blindly copying a centuries-old design with centuries-old tools.

Graham.