Cort Essence GA4 Brown Top

I was stunned by the sound, it sounds warm, full, big and open. Between the torrefied top and the grand auditorium shape it feels very full and balanced and it has a lot more mids than I'm used to from steel string guitars like dreadnoughts. This makes sense with the narrower waist. And the highs weren't overpowering and the lows weren't boomy or just so loud I'd bother the neighbors. It doesn't have that 'piano sound' some bigger guitars with thick finish have, which I like.

Sadly mine had some problems. Mostly rough finishing, but also one structural problem. It had some tiny scuffs like scratches around the 9 volt compartment which I could live with, they cut the neck a bit crooked so they had to cut the headstock crooked to have the two parts meet up so the headstock was just a few milimeters offset to the side which was very hard to spot, but once you saw it you couldn't unsee those strings not going all in the same direction. Also a super small gap under the fretboard. I could have lived with those. But there was also a tiny crack in the top from the sound hole to the fretboard. It's not easy to see, but you can definitely feel it. I suppose it could have been superficial, but I'm not taking any risks with the top of the guitar in that location. With a guitar this fancy for this low of a price, I guess the trade-off is that not all of them are flawless.

Another quirk, the electronics that hold the volume and tone control are in the sound hole in such a way that they interfere with a feedback buster. So you might have to take a knife to the rubber of the feedback buster to get that in safely. Otherwise the rubber would really put a lot of strain on those dials.

I probably would recommend it still, but since this new 20's wave of new guitar players factories have had to up their production speed and sometimes something falls through the cracks.