Horn Violin

The horn violin is built on a very similar concept to the violin which John Matthias Augustus Stroh created in the early 1900s. Stroh violin is much louder than a standard wooden violin, and its directional projection of sound made it particularly useful in the early days of phonographic recording. As long as regular violins recorded poorly with the old acoustic-mechanical recording methods, Stroh violins were frequently used in recording studios, but became rare after record companies switched to the new electric microphone recording technology in the second half of the 1920s.

At a closer look, it is observed that there are large differences in manufacturing. Horn violins are much more supple than those created by Stroh, and in the place of the violin's usual wooden body there is a metal resonator to produce a louder and more penetrating sound.