Are the violins sold online for under a hundred dollars any good?

No, and the reason is worth understanding before you spend the money. We hold every instrument to four requirements before we will stock it: it has to sound like a violin, play like a violin, look like a violin, and be safe and easy under a child’s hand. The instruments sold online for twenty or fifty dollars meet one of the four. They look like a violin.

Sounds like a violin. The sound comes from the whole body working together, which depends on the arching of the top, how the plates are graduated in thickness, and where the sound post sits inside. When those are wrong the instrument is quiet and dull in a way a child will notice without being able to say what is wrong.

Plays like a violin. It has to hold its tuning. Pegs have to be fitted and shaped by hand so they turn smoothly and then stop. An instrument with badly fitted pegs slips out of tune every few minutes, and no amount of practice will fix that.

Safe and easy under a child’s hand. This is where the cheapest instruments do real harm. Strings set too high have to be forced down against the fingerboard, and a beginner’s fingertips show it. A bridge shaped with too flat a curve makes it very difficult to bow one string without hitting the next, so a child playing a simple exercise sounds wrong no matter what they do. The instrument does not just play poorly. It teaches a student that they cannot play.

What we see when they come in. We are shown these instruments regularly, usually after a family has already bought one. The recurring faults are the same: string height far too high, a bridge that has warped or was never fitted, notches cut so deep the sound is strangled, a neck that has pulled out of line under tension, and on cellos an endpin that is too short, bent, or will not hold position. Some of it can be corrected on our bench. Some of it cannot, because the instrument was not made straight.

Where ours come from. We buy through a small group of workshops we have worked with for around twenty years, and we look at a great many instruments to keep the ones we stock. Nothing enters the fleet that fails those four requirements, and every instrument then comes to our bench in Norwalk and is set up by a trained luthier before your student opens the case. When something goes wrong later, and something usually does, you bring it here and the adjustment is free. There is nowhere to bring the one that arrived in a box.