 It’s taken me over 2 years of testing various string configurations to settle on this and I wouldn’t even have tried fishing line if not for this blog.
As documented in the 5 posts leading to this, I tried, in order:
1.  The trustworthy Aquila Ambra 800 - not only do they differentiate between strings of the 1800s and 1900s, the Ambra 800 sounds magical, with a delicious penetrating sparkle, a sustain that seems to be prolonged by animated interplay between the harmonics from the different strings in a chord and a vibrato that not only responds to, but also encourages your creative shaping of it. Only Galli’s Titanio (which I use on a Kohno 30) comes close.
2.  Savarez became the 2nd experiment as I was still avoiding gut strings in early 2015. Not much of an impression, plus it’s a nightmare to browse their product and make a decision if you are doing this without expert advice.
3.  Having exhausted all non-gut options I ordered Kürschner gut strings from Schneider. Authentic, but expensive and they keep fraying even when I played without nails. The string can still sound good but the tone is terrible if you pluck at the frayed portions.
4.  Which brings us to fishing line trebles. I went through 3 different configurations in quick succession, first following my luthier’s recommendation (chunky almost modern sound), then to Makoto Tsuruta’s (Crane) B set (very floppy thin but enjoyable, almost lute-sounding, before settling on the gauges shown in the picture above.
Caveat: the fraying/shredding of Seaguar Ace 12 gauge as 1st string and the extremely stretchy Seaguar GrandMax FX 8 gauge (also as 1st string) may be a result not of the incorrect gauge but of the deliberately differentiated properties of the fluorocarbon lines themselves. Perhaps a GrandMax FX 12 gauge would have stretched and not frayed, or an Ace 8 gauge would have been just rigid enough? I don’t know. I might experiment further if finances allow.
N.B. These experiments were on my Tulacek Ries-copy, string length 628mm, tuned to A=430 Hz.
