Reverend guitars are now made overseas as well.
If anyone is evaluating a PRS SE series of guitars, the overseas manufacturerd thing should not matter very much at all in the decision making process.
Evaluate them for what they are and not for where they are made. These days the overseas quality (for reputable manufacturers) is high and location no longer matters the way it once did.
It's all snob appeal that makes USA guitars more attractive, even I fall for that! However, I would call an SE a true PRS, an Epiphone a true Gibson, a Squier a true Fender. It's always these people trashing on import guitars so as to make the USA guitar a superior one. Really, how many people can afford USA guitars, and if so, how many can one afford? Especially for students like me, when you have no income at all. For instance, a beginner who just bought an SE, got told that he bought a wannabe PRS and not a real one, imagine how heartbreaking could that be when he had realised that his dream of owning a piece of the PRS legacy after emptying all of his own savings, just got shattered, all thanks to gear snobbery.
Gretsch has made the move to China and Japan as well. The quality obviously wouldn't be the same as the US-made ones, there are lots of variables in production such as wood quality, hardware, construction, etc. But in the end, lots of them are all made to be the same guitars, but handled by people with different wage rates. Whether you want a Japanese/Korean guitar that can easily rival many other US-made ones in quality, or you want a US-made that you pay higher for the salary of the workers. You see all these artists gravitating towards using import guitars alongside their US counterparts. Bernie Marsden, Opeth and Zach Myers use their SEs live, Matt Heafy rocks an Epiphone on stage, Joe Trohman even uses his Squier guitars, which are "infamous" for "bad quality", on worldwide tours.
I hear people bashing on Squiers, Epiphones, just to name a few, all the time. If it's about the quality, they probably haven't tried the higher end ones. If it's about the tone, fine, go get yourself a beat-up vintage and you'll have all the tone you ever need. If it's about it being made in China, I would advise them to go ahead and pick up a Squier CV, plug it in, try it, then revise their criticism. If all else fails, I'll just call them snobs and be done with it. :laugh: