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Wow, my post about Esteban guitars sure drew quite a response. Lots of people have some pretty strong feelings about Esteban guitars - one way or the other. Predictably, most of the feedback was pretty negative…

So here is the bottom line on Esteban guitars - at least what I am hearing and reading from lots of folks who seem to know a lot about acoustic guitars: the quality and playability of these guitars is very poor. And they don’t sound very good either.

Specifically, the action on the Esteban guitars is quite high (I wrote about this when I was writing about the First Act guitars available at Walmart and other discounters). When the action is high, that means it is very difficult to form chords that sound good… and it is also very painful to play.

The other real problem with the Esteban guitars is that they are very overpriced. In fact, since I mentioned the First Act guitars above, it is about three times the cost of the First Act guitars - about $260 versus $90. But what you should be really comparing the Esteban guitars to is something like the cheaper Washburn guitars, or Ibanez guitars, or Yamaha guitars. They all have guitars for similar prices to the Esteban guitars, and the difference in quality and playability is HUGE.