Hi Kijanki - thanks for the link. I am going to have to ask one of my viola colleagues about this tomorrow! As far as I knew, the string lengths of all the instruments in the orchestra string family were approximately the same length (with the obvious exceptions of harp and piano), but that article claims this is not necessarily true of the viola. I am now wondering if this is a typically sloppy Wikipedia reference to viols, used in early music groups, which are of many different sizes, or if it does indeed apply to orchestral violas, which I tend to doubt. I will report back.
@Dracule - yes, audiophiles use quite a few terms somewhat differently than musicians do. My personal pet peeve is "neutral," LOL! But there are others, even such seemingly self-explanatory words as "mid-range." This is a very misleading term to a musician unfamiliar with how audiophiles use it, as it turns out that the vast majority of frequencies produced by acoustic instruments fall well within what most audiophiles call the midrange, though audiophiles will often disagree on exactly what constitutes the midrange. Other obvious candidates are "pace" and "timing." I have seen some very bizarre discussion of those two terms in particular on audiophile boards.
@Dracule - yes, audiophiles use quite a few terms somewhat differently than musicians do. My personal pet peeve is "neutral," LOL! But there are others, even such seemingly self-explanatory words as "mid-range." This is a very misleading term to a musician unfamiliar with how audiophiles use it, as it turns out that the vast majority of frequencies produced by acoustic instruments fall well within what most audiophiles call the midrange, though audiophiles will often disagree on exactly what constitutes the midrange. Other obvious candidates are "pace" and "timing." I have seen some very bizarre discussion of those two terms in particular on audiophile boards.