Yes, that is part of the surprising result. There is some difference and the article & study explains that difference across several experiments, if you read it. Since the claim is that the old famous violins are higher quality, the expected preference - if experts could reliably identify the old instruments - should be in favor of the old instruments. But the experiments found that while experts could see & feel some difference between new and old instruments, they could not reliably identify which was which, and tended to prefer the new instruments. Both experiments, about preference and ability to distinguish, are damaging to the narrative that experts who know what they’re looking for can reliably identify the old ones and that the old ones were higher quality.
In a totally different domain, back in the university I participated in a similar experiment with bulk lagers, where we both rated and tried to recognize the beers. It turned out that there was a clear ranking that almost everyone agreed on, but nobody could recognize the brand. One participant even gave her favourite brand the lowest grade.
I think the same thing happens with most honest wine studies. The truth is there is a huge range of quality in wine and most people agree when blind, but the quality is completely uncorrelated to price.
The interesting thing about those lagers is that many people believe you can't distinguish between them or even that they are the same drink sold under different labels. If that was the case, the scores should have been random but they weren't.
