RiverDog wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 10:43 pm
Mossman wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 8:34 pm
Awesome! I'm glad you got a more recent Casino. They really are constructed much better than the Korean ones, and a lot of the early Chinese (pre-2015) examples I've seen were downright awful.
But how do the pickups sound? The ones in mine were over-wound and sounded nasty. I'm curious if they stopped making them that way.
Thanks Ed! Everyone assumes the quality of Korean-made guitars will be superior to MIC, I suppose I'm guilty of that as well, truth be told. So that's interesting.
The pickups seem great so far. I'll have to throw a meter on my cable when I plug in next and see what they read. Regardless, my ears tell me they are pretty decent. I didn't hear anything harsh, and I played through a treble booster, an OD, and a fuzz today. Again, though, I don't know for sure that the pickups are stock yet. I'll try and check tomorrow.
It is natural to assume that the Koren ones would be better, and a lot of people traded on that assumption in the used market for a while... and for a while, they were correct.
I was still active on the Epiphone forum back when the transition happened (winter of '09/'10, I believe), and everyone was worried that quality would suffer as a result. The common logic that was used to assuage those fears was that Epiphone built and own this factory... They weren't just handing off to some anonymous Chinese contractor, they were taking control of manufacturing
themselves... They wouldn't go through all that expense and effort just to put out shoddy guitars, right?
Well, they did for a while...
Which I guess shouldn't be so surprising. I mean, they were starting up a brand new manufacturing enterprise in a foreign culture, that was pretty alien to guitars and western music. Even if they were setting up shop in the US, there would be problems. But by around 2015, Epiphone really picked up their game and made a lot of improvements. At least that's when I first noticed it.
After having seen a lot of really shitty looking Casinos, I too was of the opinion that the only good Epiphone was a Korean Epiphone (or an Elitist, but they had gotten
crazy expensive by then), and one day I was in my local Sam Ash, and they had a used Korean Casino hanging on the wall right next to a brand new Chinese Casino. Well, I got all excited for the Korean one (made in the Peerless factory, for anyone who knows) and was seriously considering buying it, but out of curiosity, I picked up the Chinese one, and right away the difference was palpable... The first thing that I noticed was that it was heavier, with a thicker top and an all-around sturdier feel to it. To be honest, it made the Korean one feel like a toy by comparison. I checked it all over carefully, and I couldn't find a single flaw, or any signs of sloppy construction, as I had seen on previous examples. It sounded louder acoustically, and it felt and played more like the Elitist that I used to own. Needless to say, I lost all interest in the Korean one... much to the chagrin of Greg, the sales guy who was working me pretty hard for the sale. I didn't have the money to buy the new one. It was right before Christmas, and I was already doing economic gymnastics in my head to figure out how I could afford the
used one, but I ended up ordering one from Sweetwater about six months later, and apart from the stock pickups, it's an awesome guitar.
Now that I think of it, I don't remember the pickups sounding bad when I played that Casino in the store, so the ones I got may have been limited to that particular run. I can't imagine them continuing to wind them that way. Sounds like they're not, if you say they sound good (believe me, if they sounded like mine did, there would be
no way you could call them anything like "good". It wasn't a
subtle thing.
).
