Yup. There will always be comparisons to those 50s and 60s Golden era guitars... it’s both a blessing and a curse. How many times do we describe a PRS by how stratty or LP-ish it is? I get that it’s a sound, a tone, that we are relating the PRS to, but doing so does pit the PRS up against the Strat and the LP... and to the Strat player or the LP player, that comparison usually ends up in PRS hate territory. They state the obvious: that the PRS is not a Strat and it’s not a LP. Well duh. Also, it’s a gamble to try to create a better upgraded clone of the Strat and the LP. I remember that the SS created lots of initial hate and discontent, lol, just like the 594 did. Some of those initial haters ended up selling their strats and LPs though.
I am one of those people who finally came to grips with the fact that my awesome PRS guitars will never sound exactly like a Strat or a LP. The PRSi could get close but that’s all. So I finally bought a Strat and a LP to go with my PRS. But it took a long time for me to come to that conclusion. Up until then, I had been trying to convince myself that ‘close’ was enough and it wasn’t. Now that I have Gibson’s and Fenders, I can fully appreciate the uniqueness of my PRS guitars, but prior to adding those two, I was growing frustrated with the PRS tone. It was never ‘hate’ but the frustration was very real despite the fact that I loved the PRS quality and body shape.
Now my Fenders, Gibson’s, and PRSi all play nicely together in the sandbox.