Are Stradivarius violins up to their reputation?

A few posts about podcasts, starting with a Skeptoid episode on "Secrets of the Stradivirius".

Skeptoid is a weekly science podcast dedicated to furthering knowledge by blasting away the widespread pseudosciences that infect popular culture, and replacing them with way cooler reality.

Each weekly episode focuses on a single phenomenon — an urban legend, a paranormal claim, alternative therapy, or something just plain stupid — that you've heard of, and that you probably believe in. Skeptoid attempts to expose the folly of belief in non-evidence based phenomena, and more importantly, explains the factual scientific reality.

The episode on Stradivirius is especially interesting when it reports a "double blinded" study comparing ancient (including Stradivarius) and modern instruments, played and listened to by professional musicians. The results strike a chord with me, since they once more show our culture's obsession with the supposedly very top of the distribution (of violins in this case) ... Read the transcript or listen to the podcast to see what I mean.