cunningham26

It seems they left all the original archtop equipment at 225 Parsons, and I doubt Gibson could compete with those prices

Little Swifty, actually

I wouldnt bat an eye at a natural finish if it played and felt like a '68- if anything they get confused with double-x braced and priced pretty low, but sound every bit as good as a 66-68

I think by '66 everything was already 1 9/16th. i've never seen a factory natural headstock on something before 68 or so, and the serials are totally inconsistent. it's like they had numbered necks in a big barrel from 66-70 and they just pulled them randomly

If it has the brown headstock, it's likely '69 as that started showing up with Norlin along with the engraved "J-45" TRC. However that doesn't immediately make it a double-braced boat anchor Norlin- these things aren't hard and fast and you can tell just by picking it up whether it's 70s style or more 60s style with the later appointments. to answer your question though, yes the natural headstock doesn't show up until sometime in 68-69 and then through the 70s

if you google "guitar center used" you can also search their nationwide used inventory. They have a few of these but they don't seem to be priced any better that Guitar Chimp, which seems to be priced to market. in terms of authenticity i see no issues- that cherry sunburst is really hard to pull off and a fake is really easy to spot- they kind of just look like epiphone hummingbirds with a gibson headstock

FWIW i have one of the 150th zephyrs from indonesia and the quality is impeccable!

yea my guess is you just may prefer the sound of mahogany back and sides and the slope shoulder more than a jumbo with maple. definitely check out the IBG Hummingbird, it seems to be the best of that IBG bunch. For as much as I love epiphones it seems like J200s just need to be a very certain Gibson thing (and like 10x the cost) otherwise you're just buying it for the aesthetic. as for strings i was a big fan of martin phosphor bronze for years and years on my epiphone hummingbird and then my gibson j45. I just switched to John Pearse strings and they're really something else. worth the extra few bucks! good luck!

lotta good advice here. J200s for as large as they are aren't particularly loud guitars- a dread or slope shoulder guitar is going to project maybe a bit more than a jumbo. especially a poly finished fresh-wood epiphone, im not surprised you're finding it to be a little muted. over time as it ages and as it is played, it will develop more character, but it's not as pronounced as their gibson counterparts with better quality components and nitro settling in faster.

ok but you're still hung up on old being a requirement here and what im trying to get across is that it is not, even if "most people" in the guitar world are of that mindset. Lloyd Loar Master Models were sought out in the 40s by Bill Monroe et al because they were superior instruments, not because they were old and superior only to the contemporary instruments being produced. Picture a circle within a circle, the smaller one being Old and the larger one being Quality. that, in my humble opinion, is vintage, even if most people wrongly associate vintage dominantly with "old" as a tactic to sell their junk. if you wanted to get the most money out of your 30 year old sneakers, my guess is you'd find a way to spin them as "Vintage 90s Sauconys EX+ condition RARE color"

you said it yourself that it's relative. most people are like you and think old = vintage that's why you see listings for VINTAGE 1974 EPIPHONE JAPAN. what i'm saying is that there are spans of time where conditions were such that the guitars made are truly different and while for the most part those spans are in the distant past, it's not exclusively in the distant past

yea but saying vintage is only if it's older than you is totally arbitrary and age still aint nothing but a number

if someone's trying to sell me a 70s bolt on epiphone acoustic telling me it's vintage because it's 50-something years old, that's not going to fly with me

a 1993 bozeman acoustic is thirty years old this year! when jimmy page was playing on House of the Holy his 1959 les paul was only thirteen years old. Keith's hummingbird was a 1965 and was recorded in 1968. Dylan's J50 was a 46 and fourteen years later he was playing coffeehouses. until he switched to an old nick lucas.