Thanks again for all the advice. I’ve had my Gibson looked at before. After a lot of thought, I had a fret job done last year. It was a hard thing to do. Those first five frets were worn so badly, it was very difficult to get a clean tone down in the “Cowboy chord” zone. But, all that fret wear, oddly, had a lot of sentimental value to my mind. I guess I mis spoke a bit when I said “useable”. It’s now actually very playable, and doesn’t seem to show any of the dreaded neck issues. It’s had an easy life, since it came into my hands. I have the bridge saddle set pretty low, with no problems. As I understand it, a higher action produces a more traditional arch top tone character (I may be mistaken on that), but the lower setup works to my satisfaction. I’m not likely to ever be banging out punchy swing rhythms at my level of ability. I do like the traditional aesthetics of the Loar models. But the couple of Eastman that I’ve seen were pretty spectacular. A local shop used to have one or two of their arch top variants in stock. They never had a pure acoustic model. But the ones with pickups played very nicely and sounded interesting acoustically. I agree that my best option is to seek out some arch tops to test drive, for sure. I think Sweetwater has a good return policy but I would not look forward to the process.
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