I suppose, to expand on my previous comment - in the past I have been a very emphatic supporter of the SE line, but recently I went to the shop and the majority of the SE’s they had, had some obvious fretboard/fretwork issues. A brand new DGT SE with a nasty couple of cracks in the rosewood board, naturally occurring but should never have made the cut to be on a guitar nonetheless, and some pretty bad tooling marks from fret finishing on the board. A few others had good boards, but stray tool marks on them as well. I’ve never seen SE QC issues like this in the past. I think I’m moving to the “S2 or don’t bother camp” at least until I see some solid work coming out of CorTek.
Edit: at least for those looking for a serious instrument. Still a good beginner guitar in many cases, but they lost me on the “serious instrument” market when they went to the $499 price point in 2024. I couldn’t get one that cheap when I got into the brand 15+ years ago. It’s not what it used to be, and I think that’s ok when we consider getting people into guitar, but after the intro, move to S2.
Disappointing isn't it? And yet, it was expected by lots of people way back when PRS started their SE line.
PRS made its reputation on fanatical quality, beauty and solid tone based on US-made guitars coming from its Maryland plant. The wood is of the best quality and it's properly dried. The workers have worked and learned their jobs under people who have built them since the early days. The hardware is excellent. The pickups sound great.
US-made PRS', whether Core or S2, feel like instruments that meet the expectations of the market. Some are fancier than others, but they're almost always very sweet guitars, made as well or better than anyone else's.
The reputation is still deserved for its US lines.
Is it being tarnished by declining quality in the stuff they make in someone else's factory that simply carries a PRS decal? I guess that's debatable, but the vagaries of overseas manufacturing make it a risk.
We often see people here in recent years saying, "I bought an SE because PRS' are supposed to be perfect, yet this one is far from perfect."
Well, not only is it not perfect, what's little understood is that it isn't a PRS, regardless of what the headstock says. The guitar is designed and licensed by PRS, yes -- but it's built completely, 100% by a different company. There are no two ways around this. It's the nature of off-shoring. PRS is the customer for these companies, not the manufacturer.
A variety of unfortunate trade-offs set in as market pressure has forced even those third party manufacturers to move production to places where labor is the cheapest they can find.
Hence, formerly made in Korea, now made in Indonesia.
I don't know where they'll have to go next. But it probably isn't going to be pretty.
Going offshore you're stuck with the manufacturing quality level of whoever can build the object to a reasonable standard for the lowest price, and you're also stuck with the vagaries of overseas manufacture, including materials, environmental conditions like high humidity (bad for guitar building), and the lowest-paid labor.
If PRS did what Gibson does with Epiphone - slap another name on the foreign guitar - it might be less problematic.
It's pretty lame that people give lip service to ideas like "buy American made products," when the fact is that
most Americans don't want to shell out the coin to actually follow through on that concept.
I'm not sure there's a reasonable solution to this problem.
