The violin set that I posted about above,... is called the Hutchins Consort New Violin Family Octet.
They are the lifes work of Dr. Carleen Hutchins, as put forth in a challenge by
Henry Brant, in the late 40's. He said,
fix the violins, and I'll write a concerto for them.
She did, and he did. But it took her 40 years to do so. I'm not certain, but, I think I recorded the debut of this piece? I'll need to dig into my records/recordings.
In creating that set of violins, they literally dissected and drilled holes in a Strad violin, to find out what made it work.
That was the starting point, to find out what made the basic violin what it was, and, find its limitations (higher frequency than attainable, and lower ranges), and fill the holes in the viol family.
Their intention was to make the Strad the center point, and surround it with 7 voice matched violins to compliment it. They quickly found out that the Strad struggled to keep up with the rest of the Consort, and set out to create a replacement for the Strad, calling it the Mezzo, or, He-Man violin. They finally ended up with the eight harmonically voice matched violins.
A string quartet is typically a mismatched assemblage of different viol family instruments; not all are violins. And there are gaping frequency range holes between instruments, and, varying harmonic voice imbalances inherent, and present.
So, there are eight sets of eight instruments. Two are owned by The Hutchins Consort, one on the west coast, in Encinitas, and the other on the east coast, in New York. The East Coast set is infrequently played. That leaves six more sets; one owned by the British Royal family, and the rest are in art and music museum collections.
They are the first set of harmonically voice matched violins that completely cover the entire range of written music, in the entire 500+ year history of violin making. They range from disappearing dog note top end, to huge chest thumping bottom end.
To say these are unique, rare, and priceless is an understatement. But, the bow choice is completely dependent on the players own needs and styles.