An experienced player could tell by the feel and sound -- if they know what to look for. The problem is the guitars are so rare and expensive that the intersection of {skilled enough} with {has experience with enough originals} is not huge. They mention Joe Bonamassa as one example.
> An experienced player could tell by the feel and sound
This claim has been made about other instruments, for example people have claimed a Stradivarius violin can be identified by a professional who knows what to look for. When tested in a blind study, the professionals preferred newer instruments more often than not. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/04/elite-violinists-fai...
Yes, that is part of the surprising result. There is some difference and the article & study explains that difference across several experiments, if you read it. Since the claim is that the old famous violins are higher quality, the expected preference - if experts could reliably identify the old instruments - should be in favor of the old instruments. But the experiments found that while experts could see & feel some difference between new and old instruments, they could not reliably identify which was which, and tended to prefer the new instruments. Both experiments, about preference and ability to distinguish, are damaging to the narrative that experts who know what they’re looking for can reliably identify the old ones and that the old ones were higher quality.
In a totally different domain, back in the university I participated in a similar experiment with bulk lagers, where we both rated and tried to recognize the beers. It turned out that there was a clear ranking that almost everyone agreed on, but nobody could recognize the brand. One participant even gave her favourite brand the lowest grade.
I think the same thing happens with most honest wine studies. The truth is there is a huge range of quality in wine and most people agree when blind, but the quality is completely uncorrelated to price.
The interesting thing about those lagers is that many people believe you can't distinguish between them or even that they are the same drink sold under different labels. If that was the case, the scores should have been random but they weren't.
The quality of the replicas and originals both varied. It is reasonably well acknowledged now that at least by the end of the "lawsuit era" (in 1977 Gibson sued the distributor of Ibanez who was the main brand behind them) the Japanese copies were higher quality than the official product.
There is vale in the name though and particularly when they were still producing a quality product.
I'm lucky enough to own a Japanese Ibanez from that era. Even though it was abused badly by previous owners, it's one of the best instruments I've ever owned.
I'm skeptical of people's ability to self-report things that affect them in subtle and not-entirely-conscious ways.
For instance, take a major scale played by a monophonic synthesizer of some kind. I know that a major scale in 12-tone equal temperament differs substantially from a major scale in just intonation. (The thirds and sixths are all off in various directions by about 13-15 cents.) I know that if I play such an instrument in equal temperament I'll get bored/annoyed with it sooner. At the same time, if I listen to a major scale in equal temperament and just intonation, I probably won't be able to tell you which one is which even though I know they're quite different. (In a chord the difference is much more obvious.)
Agreed. If extending the domain from guitars to beers or wines, then how about to cars? Can anyone tell the difference between a Veyron and a Ford F100? I hope so.
Hint: the Ford has a gun rack in the rear window;the Bugatti has a V-16.
