At its most basic, a violin is a shapely wooden box. Four strings produce sound. Two curling holes in the top of the instrument channel the vibrations, which are amplified in the box and expelled.

Simple. And not.

For what emerged from that marvel of acoustical design hundreds of years ago was a sound so rich and sonorous it would turn the musical world on its head.

The violin produced a bigger voice, across a greater range, than any stringed instrument before it. Within decades of its invention in the mid-16th century -- debate about its precise origin continues -- the violin spread across Europe.

By the 17th century, it had begun to revolutionize the way people listened to music, its big sound allowing the move from parlor to public place. Ultimately, it would lead to the modern concert hall, the symphony orchestra and much of the music we call classical.

As a cultural touchstone, the violin appealed to all levels of society, from monarchs to transients. It was portable, adaptable and relatively affordable. It could be played indoors or out, by adults or children, for fun or profit.

	At the Museo Stradivariano visitors view artifacts from Antonio Stradivari himself, including his tools.

"It's an instrument of incredible flexibility," said David Schoenbaum, a University of Iowa historian and amateur violinist who is writing a social history of the violin.

"Everybody in the world plays it for every imaginable reason," Schoenbaum said. "Norwegian fishermen, Mexican mariachis, Hungarian gypsies, Jewish klezmorim, north Indian and south Indian raga players, Celtic fiddlers from the Orkney Islands to West Virginia, jazz players from Joe Venuti to Regina Carter. Plus Paganini, Heifetz and Perlman. What other instrument can match that? It literally sings like nothing else."

Through the 1600s and for more than half of the following century, a small town in northern Italy stood at the center of the violin universe.

It was in Cremona, founded in 200 B.C. as a Roman military outpost, that history's early luthiers, as makers of stringed instruments are known, established family dynasties whose strings are now among the most expensive: the Amatis, helped along by the loss of rivals to the plague; the Guarneris, whose fame would soar after their deaths; the Bergonzis and the Rugeris.

Antonio Stradivari would rise above them all.

The Stradivari mystique remains as strong as ever. The name Stradivari has become synonymous with the classic violin, romanticized in films and novels, an object coveted for centuries. People have stolen them. People have killed for them.

"There's a mythological history to them," said violin-maker and dealer Bruce Carlson, an American who has lived in Cremona since 1977. "Everyone wants to know the secret of Stradivari. If you're in the business of high-end violin sales, you have to lean on this a little bit, but it's not all hype and hard sell. There's some truth to it."

The search for that secret goes on, debates and new theories bubbling forth every few years. Was it the wood Stradivari chose, or the way he planed it? The ingredients of his varnish? His method of mating a violin's soundboard with its ribs and back? In the quest for answers, Stradivari's violins have been subjected to X-rays, ultrasound, chemical testing, spectroscopic study and microscopic inspection.

Only one consensus has emerged: The man made great fiddles.

Over the course of his 93 years, Stradivari is believed to have produced some 1,100 instruments, mostly violins. He also made violas, cellos and at least four guitars. Estimates on how many of his strings remain vary between 550 and 650. Depending on their quality and whether most of their parts are original, they sell in a range from several hundred thousand dollars to several million.

Instruments from only one other maker, Guarneri del Gesu -- producing a brawnier sound that grew into favor with the emergence of larger concert halls -- have sold for more.

Newer violins, a broad category that in the string trade includes anything made after 1800, can't compete. Since the late 19th century, some acousticians, experts and dealers have sought to pierce what they call the old-violin myth. Blind tests have proved inconclusive. Sometimes experts or audiences can pick out a Strad. Sometimes they can't.

While those findings might be enough to suggest a Strad or a del Gesu sounds no better than the work of someone like Brooklyn's Samuel Zygmuntowicz, considered among the best luthiers in the world today, famous soloists continue to gravitate to the "big fiddles," a dealer term for the most expensive instruments.

"For the last two centuries, there hasn't been a great violinist who hasn't wanted to play on a Stradivari or a del Gesu," said Robert Bein, whose Chicago firm, Bein and Fushi, is one of the world's largest dealers of high-end strings. "They give the player something special. They have some magic in them."

But if there is an impregnable aura around such instruments, there is also great ambiguity.

How does a musician know, after all, he or she is really playing a Strad or a del Gesu or, for that matter, the Montagnana now in the collection of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra?

The violin-makers of the 17th and 18th centuries left no catalog of their work. Those looking to authenticate an old instrument today rely in part on provenance, or the trail of ownership and certification by experts, but that history of transactions often starts in the 20th century.

"It's hard to follow the trail," said Robert Ames, a Fort Lee bow-maker and instrument dealer. "You'll have wars, and entire inventories are lost. Things get sold at auction and quite often you don't get any papers. Instruments still get stolen all the time."

Violins have been copied since the instruments first came into vogue. John Lott, considered by some England's best violin-maker, built a career on such trickery. Through the early and mid-1800s, Lott made such exacting copies of Stradivari and del Gesu instruments that they continue to fool some experts today.

An authenticator might try to divine the truth about an instrument from its label, which provides an important baseline for establishing a maker's work. But labels have been switched and forged so frequently they can't be entirely trusted.

"That goes way back into history," said Brian Harvey, a Briton who co-authored the 1998 book "Violin Fraud: Deception, Forgery and Lawsuits in England and America."

"You don't see so much of it happening now," Harvey said, "but it certainly muddled things in terms of identification."

It muddled things as far back as 1685, the year of the first recorded dispute about a violin. According to the archival record, a northern Italian composer named Tomasso Vitali bought a violin he believed to be an Amati. He later discovered the Amati label had been placed atop one identifying the maker as Francesco Rugeri, a lesser star. Vitali promptly petitioned the Duke of Modena for help in obtaining a refund.

"Unfortunately, fakes are not rare at all," said Stefan Hersh, a professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago and a consultant to those who buy and sell rare stringed instruments. "Forgery and deception have been part of the violin world since violins were invented."

It was a world unfamiliar to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, but one quite well known to Herbert Axelrod.