Acoustic Guitar Magazine Players Choice Awards (yes mando too)

[multidon]

Once a year AG magazine polls their readers and based on readers "favorites" awards gold, silver, and bronze medals. I just got my issue and found it interesting. For example they also include mandolin, banjo, and ukulele. Here are the mandolin results:

Gold- Gibson Silver- Collings. Bronze- Eastman

Notice this is a popularity contest. Not necessarily the instruments that readers own. Perhaps they want to own them or for whatever reason perceive them as the best.

I also was interested in the Tuners category considering how much Snark bashing there is here lately.

Gold- Snark. Silver- Korg. Bronze- Boss

And just for the record, everyone's favorite acoustic guitar is the Martin D-28. No surprise there.

Again, what I find interesting is that this is a poll of reader's perceptions of what is best. And since this is primarily a guitar magazine (granted that there are some multi instrumentalists) what are they basing the mandolin perceptions on? My guess is they see what the mandolinists that they work with and what they're playing. And of course Gibson is a much broader category than Collings or Eastman because they have been around so much longer. It is just as likely these guitar players are seeing and hearing vintage Gibsons as new ones. By contrast Collings and Eastman haven't been around long enough for "vintage" examples to be out there.

Anyways I just thought it was interesting.

[LongBlackVeil]

Yea your probably right, most of the votes are probably just perception and no actuall experience. But remember there's a lot acoustic musicians who love all of the major acoustic instruments and play more than one, I'm sure plenty readers actually do play mandolin. Like myself, but i sense that most only dabble with it.

I think it would've been really cool if it was broken up into big scale manufacturers and small builders/luthiers, like it was for the acoustic guitar category.