I was a serious player as an adolescent, in lessons and my city's youth symphony and school orchestra and chamber music and ALL of that, but suffered burnout and got a degree in voice instead. My viola got dusty. Post college, I have brought back my neglected viola and started playing regularly at the church I sing at, so I decided my poor strings needed to be replaced.Since the stakes are low, I thought I might try a different set of strings. I acknowledge that, at a point, literally any strings would sound better than my old ones did. But even with that in mind, these are so especially nice to play! I used to use Thomastik Dominants at the recommendation of my teacher. I honestly wasn't sure if I would notice a big difference in brands, but I sure did.I have little fingers and, now, a chronic illness with lots of pain so playing can be taxing. I also have always felt my vibrato wasn't very good, and my C string sounded muddy and dark. When I opened up this C, it almost seemed too skinny to be C, compared to the Dominant! But it's still beautiful. These are SO easy to play with a lighter hand and my vibrato is much smoother and more resonant. Perfect for meditative church music. My sound is overall cleaner, and I don't have to work quite so hard for it, so I just want to play all the time. Plus, they're cheaper than the Dominants! Thanks for making me want to play my instrument!

Je cherchais un jeu de cordes qui valorise bien le moelleux du violon alto, qui soit homogène du grave à l'aigu, et qui sonne bien. Ce jeu de cordes remplit bien ces conditions.

If you have an old violin be carefully because these have a high tension, good rich sound and very short playing in time

I ordered this string set for my 16.5 inch viola and they sound great. The ONE issue I have is this- I put the strings on my viola and tuned them up to let them stretch, and let them stay that way for the weekend. When I went to tune them up again today, the A string broke right at the ball end. I didn't overtune or stress out the string inordinately, so, buyer beware-this might happen to yours. I managed to improvise a fix that allowed me to use the A string, but boy talk about disappointing. Thus only 4 stars. Again though, great tone.

I put these on a 16.5" student viola that shipped with Prelude strings. The Preludes had some brash, metallic overtones that I really didn't like. The Zyex were a huge improvement. They're still plenty bright enough for my taste without the brashness. I considered Helicore since I use them on my violin, but I'm glad I chose Zyex.