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Comment by wavesplash | Hacker News Reader

Fender makes a whole series of Strats at different price points. The challenge is even at the high end Fender has inconsistent QA, so the 'knockoffs' are sometimes way better quality/consistency. See this video for more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU7RUpkXsV0

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Can't compete on quality, so compete by attempting to use the courts to bludgeon your competitors. A tale as old as capitalism

I think I watched that video but sadly there is no sound comparison to demonstrate the quality issues.

A lot of guitar quality signals will not show through easily in the sound. Like how easy or difficult it is to fret the strings, how well it stays in tune in a controlled environment over time, fit and finish work, etc. That kind of stuff makes the difference between a guitar that can be played, and a guitar which is fun to play.

Right.

Almost all of the variation between sufficiently similar electric guitars, barring the quality of the pickups and maybe some of the electronics, can be eliminated in the setup.

And a lot of the expensive luxury stuff people are convinced has an impact on the sound has approximately zero impact on the sound.

sound doesn't really tell you about quality issues, quality issue are more does it have any fret ends that cut into your fingers as you move up and down the neck, are any of the frets too high and causing buzzing, does it maintain its pitch or do you frequently need to re-tune it, is it well setup from the factory, are the strings too high, things like that.

Making two guitars sound similar, especially if the goal was that these guitars should sound similar, isn't all that hard. But also just because they're both the same style of guitar, doesn't mean the goal was for them to sound the same. Even just looking at Fender's line up, different strats have different pickups which are designed to sound different

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