I love this thread, because everybody is right. A lot depends on the kind of music your playing, and whether you are using the guitar primarily as accompaniment, or instrumentally. My friend Luke, who could make a packing crate sound good was able to do that because we were trying to sound like the old 78's re-issued on the Anthology Of American Folk Music. We had poor fidelity built-in to our sound.. Luke's guitar would have been terrible if he was doing bluegrass, and even he couldn't have salvaged it. Blues guitarists have favored Gibsons more than Martins over the years, but even there it depends to some extent what kind of blues you're playing. Mance Lipscomb recorded on a Harmony guitar for some of his stuff, and it had a nice, funky sound to it. I personally think he would have lost something playing a Martin, even though the guitar was much better.

When I played duets on guitar with Luke, he'd play nylon string (anethema for all but 60's girl folkies and Gordon Bok :-)) and I'd play steel string, and the resulting sound was different (and much better to our ears) than if we both used steel string guitars.

Jerry