Well sometimes the old stuff actually IS better. (case in point: Yes. Compare
Close to the Edge to their last couple of records. not even close, sorry.)
As to guitars, sometimes the old stuff actually is better as well. I have a house full of guitars. Well, one room, but it's a BIG room LOL. I have nice old ones. I have nice new ones, as in brand new, less than 2 years old. I have lots of nice ones in that in-between stage, more than 5 years old, less than 20. While I'm not going to argue the point that in many cases what you describe is exactly what's going on (how else would Fender be moving so many "relic" Stratocasters?) there's another whole side to it that tends to get ignored, which is that some people who play actually
listen and make relatively objective judgments about the relative merits of different instruments. Of course their perspectives are colored at least to some extent by experience and the sounds they grew up with, not one of us is ever truly objective, but some people wear that a lot more lightly than others. In any event, there are some clear and very obvious differences in character between the old ones taken-as-a-group and the new ones taken-as-a-group. Which is the only way one can actually deal with these issues, because there is so much individual variation among guitars (even ones that are ostensibly "the same") that it's a fool's errand to simply compare two guitars and think one can learn anything generalizable from doing so.
In the meantime, I just had a conversation on the topic of energy fields and guitar/player interaction with a good friend, while said friend was doing virtual acupuncture on me from 1000 miles away. One thing that came up had a direct bearing on the "it's all in the hands" theory. (well, it all did, but this particular thing is a little more in line with what most people would recognize as "scientifically valid") Our bodies have an electromagnetic field. It's how your iPhone or tablet works -- the screen responds to the electric signal your fingertip generates. It even gets to know your particular galvanic response a little better over time, sort of like the voice-recognition part. ("Siri")
Well, consider an electric guitar. What are you doing? Your one hand is pressing down on those metal strings, right? And your other hand is more or less right over those pickups, which themselves are creating a magnetic field that responds to the motion of the strings. (and RF information that's out there as well, as anyone who plays single-coil pickups knows all too well) Don't you think that the particular person's magnetic signature would make a difference, and be part of why, when I pick up Kimock's guitar and he picks up mine, the guitars sound very different than they do when in the hands of their owners? Yeah, the bag of protoplasm holding the guitar makes a diff too, and I'm sure it would be a complicated knot to untangle if you wanted to figure out which element made "more" difference. How much difference does it make? Well from a perceptual standpoint, that all depends on how good your perceptual apparatus is. And I'm not just talking about hearing-as-measured-by-an-audiologist, I'm talking about how well you can interpret the information your perceptual apparatus is sending to your brain. Two very different (if not entirely unrelated) issues.
And then there's the whole question of, "Does the guitar remember that energetic interaction over time? Does the player?" To my friend, the answer is as plain as the nose on his face. But he operates a little differently than most of us.
To me, it just makes more sense than the alternative hypothesis (
there's no memory effect, no effect at all from playing a guitar over time, on either the player or on the guitar) which flies in the face of my nearly 50 years' experience playing guitars.
