Zeke, as it happened, yesterday in a music store in Anchorage I played a restored 1963 Gibson Dove acoustic guitar with an original metal Tune O Matic bridge on it. The guitar looked great, but it sounded like a box of silverware being kicked down six flights of stairs.
Here's a similar 1963 Gibson Dove:
Here's a closer look:
There are two major (and probably insurmountable) problems with using an adjustable metal bridge saddle inset into a wooden bridge on the top of a flattop guitar: the first and probably most important is weight. That much mass definitely impedes the free vibration of the top.
Since the only way you get any sound out of an acoustic guitar is by the mechanical vibration of the top, you've started off on the wrong foot from the very beginning by putting that chunk of metal there to press down on the top.
The second probably insurmountable problem is that the saddle is the only way those string vibrations GET transmitted to the top, and the Tune O Matic is designed for a passive role on an electric guitar, not for the active role required by the job of a saddle on an acoustic guitar.
When I use the terms "active" and "passive" here I don't mean one gets a battery in it and the other doesn't, I mean that on a solidbody electric guitar the primary transmission route of the string vibrations is through the pickups, not through the bridge saddle.
But on an acoustic guitar being played acoustically, the bridge saddle is all you've got to transmit the music that you're playing.
So the Tune O Matic bridge that works so marvelously well on an electric guitar is very close to a total tone-killer on an acoustic guitar.
Yes, it transmits some vibrations, and, yes, the convenience of being able to dial in the intonation so precisely and so easily sure is nice. But from a musical tone standpoint it's really not a good choice for using on an acoustic guitar.
One thing you can do with that idea, though, is possibly have a removable Tune O Matic bridge saddle that you could use to quickly determine where the intonation is best, then you could use that as a practical, three dimensional template for a bone saddle that you would then carve and put in place on the guitar. That might be the best of both worlds.
But using a Tune O Matic bridge full time on an acoustic guitar you actually want to play? No, you'd lose far more tone, volume and acoustic projection than the convenience could ever possibly make up for. The trade-off is really not worth it.
Hope that makes sense.
Wade Hampton Miller