Dr. Fritz, a flutist, added: “People say, ‘Why do you want to destroy the Strad?’ That is not true. I actually think it’s a beautiful instrument. I just want that young soloists can make a career without having an old instrument. You can play amazingly well without having a Strad.”

Dr. Fritz and a team including a modern violin maker, Joseph Curtin, began their new-versus-old research in 2010, asking 21 players at an international competition in Indiana to put on goggles that obscured their vision, and try three new violins and three old. Thirteen chose a new violin as their favorite; the least favorite of the six was a Stradivarius, researchers reported.

The results struck some in the string world with the dissonance of a John Cage chord plunked into a Scarlatti sonata. Violinists complained of unrealistic testing conditions — for instance, that the violins were played in a hotel room.

For the new study, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, many improvements were made. There were 12 instruments, six old and six new, with new ones “antiqued” to appear older. The violinists, 10 professional soloists, had more time: 75 minutes in a rehearsal room and 75 minutes in a 300-seat concert hall, both in Paris. They used their own bows, compared the test violins with their own, and could choose to have a listener provide feedback, and to have a piano accompanist. At one point, an orchestra accompanied them; the results of that segment will be published in a later study.

Six soloists chose a new violin for a theoretical concert tour. One particular new violin, with a loud, assertive sound, was favored by four, perhaps because as soloists, they thought about projecting sound over an orchestra, researchers said. The soloists rated new violins higher, on average, for playability, articulation and projection. And their guesses of which violins were new or old were no better than chance.