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Originally Posted by MC5C
I personally believe the blind tests where listeners were unable to reliably tell which guitar had what wood, and that the back and side wood selection of a typically braced (heavy thick braces on the back to deaden all resonance, increasingly sides designed to be acoustically dead so as to not rob energy from the top) side and back of a flat-top acoustic make very little difference. So, having answered my question about tone, it comes down to rarity, tradition, and beauty. Brazilian rosewood has all of that in spades, and it costs a lot more, and so it must be better... There is another facet to this - brazilian rosewood guitars have, for many decades, been the top of the line, the best made by the best luthiers. They really should sound better, even if the tone is a byproduct of the wood and not a direct result of the wood.
Brian
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Respectfully, your logic escapes me. As an analogy, Strads are far more expensive and tend to be preferred by performing violinists. But the evidence doesn't suggest they're fundamentally "better" instruments with regard to sound. Listening tests prove otherwise. But they cost more because people -- especially audiences --
believe they are better (a belief that doesn't survive objective testing) and performers can best succeed by giving their audience what they want. So costing more doesn't equate to "better."
Nor does rarity imply better. Black ebony has become very rare. And guitars have certainly been made with black ebony bodies. Does that mean that they're better than good guitars made with less rare woods? Some might prefer them, others won't. But the rarity of the wood (try finding ebony sets in sizes suitable for a dreadnought guitar) doesn't make them "better."
Nor is it the case that rosewood is always chosen for "top guitars." For some players, Brazilian is the perfect wood for what they want form a guitar. For others, it simply isn't, at any price. Back when "rosewood" meant "Brazilian," some people still preferred to spend comparable amounts on other woods, like maple. (Mahogany was always a special category in that it got associated with less expensive instruments that did generally cost less than rosewood. Martin has generally offered flattops in either mahogany or rosewood. So, by default, rosewood was the choice for their higher-tier models.) In the teens (the catalogs I had available) Vega, for example, offered its top "Special Artists" series guitars in curly maple in about 1917. A few years earlier, it had been rosewood but that was relegated to mid-level guitars by 1917. In that year, their lowest-tier models were mahogany and the mid level models were rosewood (which was undoubtedly Brazilian at the time). Likewise, its cylinder-back mandolins featured maple on the top models, rosewood in the middle, and mahogany on the least expensive. In a Washburn catalog from the 1800s (when they far outsold Martin), every guitar listed (and they range from $20 to $100), is rosewood. So its use on the cheapest offerings doesn't suggest that it was seen as particularly special but rather, pretty ordinary. Over at Gibson, some of their most expensive flattop guitars, like the Nick Lucas Special and the J-200 used either rosewood or maple at various times. There wasn't any strict price delineation by wood choice. Year, size, and other features seemed to be more important price determinants.
Beauty is certainly subjective, as well. Some of the most valuable Brazilian guitars around -- vintage Martins -- have straight-grain Brazilian backs that really don't strike me as more beautiful than Indian rosewood. The most visually striking Brazilian, with wild grain and color variation, would likely have been rejected by Martin for those 1930s guitars. And if tradition is the benchmark, there have been mahogany guitars for a very long time. And spruce-over-maple has been the formula for the world's most valuable stringed instruments for centuries. So, it depends on how you define things and what comparisons you choose to make, as to whether the rosewood tradition is the longest standing. For flattop guitars, maybe. For archtops, certainly not. And for prestige orchestral stringed instruments, certainly not.
So, rarity, cost, tradition, selection for top models, and beauty don't seem to be a basis for Brazilian's currently hallowed status. None of this diminishes the appeal of Brazilian rosewood for those who prefer it, of course. It's a great wood by any analysis. But as to whether it's the "king of woods" used in guitar building, personal preferences, bragging rights, investment protection, and the prestige of instruments built before Brazilian got scarce -- rather than an objective superiority of any sort -- seem to be the basis for such claims.