What Fiddle Players Have Said About Our Violins Since 2011

We started selling violins on eBay in 2009. We didn't have a website. We didn't have a marketing team. We just made instruments in our Guangzhou workshop and shipped them to whoever bought them.

What we didn't expect was that players would start talking about us — on forums we'd never heard of, in threads we never wrote, years before we built a website at all.

We recently came across some of those old discussions. They're not testimonials we collected. They're not reviews we asked for. They're just players, on forums like Fiddle Hangout, comparing notes about Chinese eBay violins back in 2011 — and our eBay store, then known as "joyee-music," kept coming up.

If you bought from us back then, or have seen our old eBay name mentioned in an old thread, this is us — same workshop, same craftsmen, now selling directly as Joyee Violins.

Here's what they said, and why it still matters to us today.

"This is definitely the best sounding violin I ever owned"

In a 2011 thread on Fiddle Hangout, a buyer was comparing two violins he'd bought from Chinese eBay sellers. He wrote in detail about the setup quality straight out of the box — describing the bridge as already well-fitted, needing only a small touch-up to the nut, and noting that the instrument arrived properly set up rather than needing a complete redo, which he said was "a big surprise" compared to other cheap violins he'd encountered.

After playing it for a few days, his conclusion was direct: it was the best sounding violin he'd owned or made, describing it as sweet, smooth, and easy to play, with good balance across the strings.

We didn't write that. We didn't ask for it. Someone bought a violin, played it for a few days, and decided to say so publicly, with no reason to be generous to us.

"He does give a nice view of the bridge"

In a different Fiddle Hangout thread, players were discussing how to evaluate Chinese eBay violins before buying — sight unseen, based only on listing photos. One experienced buyer explained his method: he always looks closely at the bridge in photos, because the quality of a bridge cut tells you a lot about the rest of the instrument.

He specifically mentioned our listings as a seller who consistently showed clear, close-up bridge photos — unlike many sellers who didn't. For him, that transparency was part of what made our listings trustworthy.

We've always believed that if you're confident in your setup work, you show it clearly. That thread is one of the first times we learned that buyers were actually paying attention to that detail — and using it to decide who to trust.

What this tells us, looking back

We started selling in 2009. By 2011, players who had never met us, never spoken with us, and had no reason to promote us were already discussing our instruments by name in forum threads — comparing them to other sellers, evaluating our bridge work, and reporting back on how the instruments actually played after they arrived.

That's the kind of feedback you can't manufacture. It happened because real players bought real instruments and had real experiences worth writing about.

17 years later

We're still doing the same thing we were doing in 2009 — building each instrument by hand in our Guangzhou workshop, setting up every bridge and nut and soundpost ourselves, and standing behind what we make. Our eBay feedback has stayed at 100% positive across hundreds of transactions since we started.

The forum threads from 2011 are still out there if you want to read them yourself — search "joyee-music" on Fiddle Hangout and you'll find them. We didn't write them, and we can't take them down even if we wanted to — which we don't. They're a small, honest record of what players thought of our instruments back when nobody was trying to sell anyone anything.

We'd like to think the instruments we make today would earn the same kind of unprompted feedback. That's still the only kind that means anything to us.

We've been handmaking violins, violas, and cellos in our Guangzhou workshop since 2007, selling directly to players since 2009. Entry-level instruments from $199, intermediate from $379, performance level from $799.