system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Wooden instruments such as violins are praised for their age because of sound quality growing over time (at least that's what I was told growing up). Why does it seem like this is not the case for guitars?
gpt
as other commentors have noted, it is in fact also the case for the guitar. however, the guitar was both invented (or let's say achieved its final form) and popularized later than the violin, so there were fewer guitars made and fewer survived than violins of comparable age. the metropolitan art museum in nyc has a guitar made by stradivarius, and you better believe it's praised! also early martins and gibsons from a much more recent era, newer but still praised.

one interesting theory about why violins from that era are prized, aside from the quality of their manufacture, is that they were made from trees that we don't have access to today due to logging. another theory is that trees in a certain era had grown during the little ice age in europe and so their wood was more dense and conducive to acoustics.