[66strummer]

Turp......

Thanks for the honest in-depth review. It will likely help others in deciding on a decent affordable guitar with the specs you mentioned. My gut assessment about Recording King is that they are continually improving the quality of what they produce. I picked up a Recording King RDC-57 (dreadnaught) on Ebay awhile back and was completely unimpressed with it tonally. I later found out that there was a RK dealer within 90 minutes of me. I took the guitar there to compare it to other dread models he had in stock. My comparisons revealed that all of the dreads had the same unimpressive (inhibited) tone as mine. Granted these were all seemingly very heavily built guitars (overbuilt IMO). I'll bet yours is not a heavy guitar to pick up (general weight). I think that the very early Recording Kings were overbuilt and speculate that later models were much better tonally as they adjusted the bracing (and perhaps other things) to get a more full, open tone. I will say that the older models I played seem to be built very nicely on the outside, but the tone just doesn't (didn't) cut it. Mine's been for sale locally for awhile now. Beautiful, classy looking guitar otherwise. I'd like to play some of the newly produced models as I have a much better feeling about them.


Side note: Meanwhile I have been completely blown away by what Stanford has produced in their affordable Performer series acoustic guitars. It's a crime IMO that so few (ONE) dealer is all that can be found in states throughout the US. If I had the resources and retail knowledge I would become dealer #2. They are that good! I'm afraid this company doesn't feel it needs US business to be successful. No real aggressive plans to market them here from what I gather. Yet the dread models are by far the best sounding (Bluegrass styled) imports I've played within their sub $1K price category. BTW, I only mention this additional stuff because Recording King, Blueridge, Morgan Monroe, Stanford etc... all tie into the same "Martin clone" import category on many of their instruments.