There's going to be an American Vintage 2 series apparently.

[Kinx]

I just came back from shooting a video that compares bunch of different jazzmasters: from JMJM classic vibe through my two 70s jazzmasters to an insanely expensive masterbuilt JM (this one) and for me and everyone in the room, the best "new" guitar was the AVRI II 1966 - it was so much better than the masterbuilt it was funny. It was just as good as the vintage ones, but with better build quality. The masterbuilt costs six times more than the AVRI II, but the AVRI was at least six times better guitar It's not that the masterbuild was a bad guitar, the build quality was perfect - it just sounded completely bland and boring, completely lacking the wiriness and musicality of the AVRI.

That's interesting...

Now, here's the GIANT caveat that I want to get out of the way: My experiences with the AVII JMs has been guitars hanging on the wall at my local Guitar Center, so very, VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY far from ideal conditions. Also, my personal collection may contain unicorns. Scientifically, the sample set is small and the conditions have not been isolated.

I tried a LPB and a sunburst AVII recently and... I didn't feel very much of a difference between those and the Squier CV necks I have on my JMs. That kinda surprised me because this isn't my first rodeo with vintage reissues and I expected a bit more of a difference in neck shape but also finish feel.

Again, to note, I didn't try them back to back at the same exact time, but I spend enough time with my own guitars to have a pretty good sense of what they feel like.

My takeaway was that I very much didn't feel that difference in price between the AVII Jazzmaster and my mostly Squier Partsmasters. But again, did I test out dogs against what may be my unicorns?

We actually unpacked this guitar from a box it was shipped in: no setup, no nothing.
Your experience may vary for sure and I haven't played any other AVRI II for comparison, but I would say the neck & body finish and other stuff like pots, bridge etc. definitely do feel different than the ones on stock Squiers. I've had a classic vibe 60s jazzmaster home for couple of weeks and it was very good (almost unbelievable for the price), but I can safely say that AVRI II is on a different level.

[BoringPostcards]

I just came back from shooting a video that compares bunch of different jazzmasters: from JMJM classic vibe through my two 70s jazzmasters to an insanely expensive masterbuilt JM (this one) and for me and everyone in the room, the best "new" guitar was the AVRI II 1966 - it was so much better than the masterbuilt it was funny. It was just as good as the vintage ones, but with better build quality. The masterbuilt costs six times more than the AVRI II, but the AVRI was at least six times better guitar It's not that the masterbuild was a bad guitar, the build quality was perfect - it just sounded completely bland and boring, completely lacking the wiriness and musicality of the AVRI.

You need to share this video!

I hope it's gonna be out soon! It will be in Czech language tho. Hopefully youtube automatic transcription & translation will work

As a linguistics nerd I am now even more excited to see the video!
Czech is a super difficult language to learn, but I rather like the sound of Czech. I had a good friend from Czechia, who taught me a lot of phrases over beers, while we were employed as tree planters back in 2004. He had a dog named Shpunt, which he claimed meant bottle cap or beer stopper, lol.
I likely won’t understand much of it, but as I do speak two Slavic languages, I may pick up on some root words here and there.

Na zdraví!

[timtam]

Youtube's real-time translation of closed-captioning text works reasonably well, at least in my experience with German to English (for watching Manfred Zollner's two youtube channels on guitar physics). It gets some guitar-specific words badly wrong, but if you know the context you can usually figure things out.

I have also tried several extensions for translation to spoken audio too. Some are paid, but this free one worked passably well after some fiddling.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detai ... cikgjacpdn