Thanks bigB, I like the sound on the first one!
yeah, read a lot of stuff from luthiers and gibson documents as well
most were probably from central america and mexico (and brazil on early 80's), but I've seen some 70's guitars with weird wood grain patterns that don't match any modern gibson and other real swietenia mahogany guitars
some luthiers claim they send 50's les paul wood samples for analysis and found woods from different sources, and some were african (and khaya is not the only african mahogany)
Its just a guess, but those 70's LP's might well be the "experimental time" where they were trying out some new woods. But the term "african mahogany" refers generally to kaya, although some people also include the earlier mentioned entandrophragma. Btw there are also a few allochthonous growing swietenia macrophylla trees in west africa, but they are not considered to be african mahogany. But my point was basically just that you probably won't notice any difference in sound, feel or appearance between kaya and swietenia and that the currently available kaya is of better quality than the latter.
After all i have to say, even if i find all that stuff interesting, two pieces of wood are never the same, even if they're from the same specimen, thats why I prefer a good "copy" (kaya) to a lower quality "original". Then again quality is, at least to some degree, subjective: some high gain players prefer the heavier mahogany from the mountain regions, because it can take more distortion before getting muddy. And btw if there is any speciemen that, from a biological pov deserves to be called "real mahogany", that would be the swietenia mahogani and not swietenia macrophylla.
