Firstly, a little background... I am a luthier with more than 30 years experience, so if my comments seem like I'm nitpicking, it's only because my job is assessing, building and setting up guitars. Flamenco guitar is a new style for me and it made sense to research and buy a decent intermediate-priced instrument to start with.
The guitar was supplied in Thomann's usual excellent packaging and arrived undamaged. On careful examination, I was able to identify a couple of minor finish flaws and some under-polished lacquer but certainly nothing that was cause for concern. The alignment and fit of the neck was perfect, the tuners properly fitted, frets well seated and for a guitar at this price point I would say that the finish quality was very good - well above average, in fact. Some of the fret ends were a little sharp and several would clearly benefit from some polishing as roughness could be felt where the strings passed over them. The golpeador did have an air-bubble under it, but this was easily sorted out. Anyway, I see none of this as negative and would rate the guitar extremely highly at the price paid.
Naturally, the guitar needed a few days for the strings to settle in and a few hours playing before evaluating the performance. I have to say, the factory setup was very good indeed. For my own purpose, I knew I would set the action a little lower, deepen and polish the nut slots and perfect the string-to-string balance of the transducer, as well as addressing the issues mentioned in my initial assessment. In short, everything would fall into a proper professional setup, which I guess many folks buying a guitar online would expect to have done once they had played the instrument for a few weeks.
I wore out the first set of strings and then setup the guitar as described above, on new Savarez high-tension strings. In summary, it plays superbly and, considering it is an electro-acoustic instrument, it has really respectable purely acoustic tone and volume too. The surprise has been how well the Fishman transducer / mic / preamp work though. Through a decent acoustic amplifier (Fishman Loudbox Artist) it sounds really good, with great dynamics and that dry, raspy flamenco voicing when you dig into the strings. If you are thinking of spending this kind of money on a flamenco guitar to use with an amplifier, you should really check out this model. There are several useful performances on YouTube and I would say that they fairly represent the capabilities of this instrument.
