This guitar was made in China. It has 22 frets and is a straight acoustic guitar. (i.e. no electrical components.) The bridge is stock plastic (?) bridge. No setting controls, as it is a straight acoustic. It has a mahogany neck and a rosewood fretboard.

The back of the neck on this guitar is nice and smooth and let's your hand slide easily up and down the neck. Because the guitar needs a set-up, the action is not that great. So I use this guitar as a practice guitar to strengthen my hands and improve my picking and fretting accuracy. As with most dreadnought style acoustics, it is difficult to get to the top notes/last frets of this guitar. I guess if you want to play high note acoustic solos, you need to get an electric acoustic with a cutaway. This guitar is light and easy to move around with. It's not so big that it's not cumbersome to play, which is great. At this price point, this acoustic sounds great. When playing chords, the sound coming out of the sound-hole is big, full and bright. It sounds better than a few thousand dollar acoustic guitars that I've played, in my opinion.

I play for a worship service, and sometimes we play some acoustic tunes. I haven't used this acoustic on stage yet, but I think it would sound great either miked or if I get a pickup for it. Like I said, I love the sound of chords coming out of this thing. Because of the action, playing single notes don't sound that great. You've got to focus on fretting properly instead of zoning in on your vibrato, etc.

The Epiphone Hummingbird HS is made in China. It has a 25.5" scale with frets. It has mahogany sides and back with a solid spruce top, and a rosewood fingerboard. It features pretty standard chrome hardware, split paralellogram fingerboard inlays, and of course the obligatory brilliant sunburst finish that Epiphone calls "Heritage Cherry Sunburtst" along with funky decorative pickguard. I was quite impressed of the quality of the finish on a 300.00 guitar.

The neck had a decent feel, nothing spectacular. At least this guitar is built to mimic the more expensive Gidson model so they already had neck specs to copy. Unfortunately, the action on the guitar I sampled was terrible, I mean absolutely dreadful. Anything beyond the 5th fret was increasingly difficult to fret, and playing anything beyond the 12th fret was almost impossible due to the high action.

Even for a 300.00 guitar, I was not at all impressed with the sound of this guitar. It had a "harsh" tonal quality that made me wonder "why?" I mean, its got a solid spruce top, a fairly large cavity to resonate, but you are left with a shrill bottomless tone.

The Epiphone AJ200SCE has a 25.5" scale, with mahogany neck and sides, and solid spruce top. It features an Epiphone-made Shadow pickup and a cutaway for ease in playing higher on the fret-board. The solid spruce top and pickup suprised me to have both of these features on a guitar that retails under $300.00.

I didn't particularly enjoy playing this guitar. It did not inspire my playing in the slightest, and I had no problem putting it down after a short bit of playing.

The neck had a nice feel to it, a good thickness and nice-feeling radius for string-bending and single-note runs as well as chording. The cutaway allows great access to the upper fretboard when you desire it.
The tone and overall sound did not initially impress me.

While this guitar boasts a feel and ease-of-play that is rare for this low of a price range, its sound did not impress me in the slightest. It sounded muffled and lacking the volume and projection I would expect of a full-size guitar such as this, although new strings could have revived it a bit. The sound was balanced; not harsh in mids or shrill in the highs, or boomy or muddy in the low end. But it was lacking in dymanics, responding very coldly to my finger picking and varying pick attack.

The Epiphone Valve Special is a true class A tube combo. It delivers 5 watts of single-ended power through an epiphone 10" speaker. It has a single input, and an 8 ohm speaker output (more on that later). An effects loop would have been nice but is nonexistant in this price range so I don't hold it against them.
This lineup of amps and heads from Epiphone is most likely their answer to the Fender Junior amps. Having high quality tube sound in a simple package thats affordable appeals to everyone from a sound-savvy beginner, players that frequent small venues and are looking for an uncomplicated setup, to studio use since their low wattage makes them easy to crank up. The whole Epiphone Valve lineup is incredibly affordable.

The Valve Special combo is a step up from the Valve Junior because unlike the VJ it offers seperate Gain and Master Volume controls (the VJ has a single level) and a moderately usable EQ, along with reverb and onboard effects. It also has a standby switch, which the lesser models do not have, so thats a bonus.

This amp is a breeze to plug into and play with minimal fuss. To be honest, I never looked at the manual. I easily got a good sound out of it with every guitar I own.

This amp is not as versatile as many would like it to be, since it is a single channel amp. With that being said, I still get a wide variety of sounds from it, but keep in mind it will not give you a metal sound, or even a high gain sound without outboard effects/stompboxes. What it will give you is a fairly British sounding bark at high gains, moderate sustain, but still with clarity on the indivudual notes. More of a slightly crunchy overdrive that never enters "distortion" territory.
My favorite strategy is plugging my Ibanez Ghostrider (Les Paul style) guitar in, maxing the Master Volume, and playing with the gain to get a perfect balance between chime and dirt. One tip for you if you have Gibson style pickups that clean up as you lower the volume (like mine do) is to use more gain than you want, and use the controls on your guitar to clean it up. It yields a creamy clean sound that is to die for if you are used to sterile solid state amplifiers. Sometimes I drive the amp with a TS9 Tube Screamer and get some great lead sounds that satisfy my need for Santana-like sustain.
The reverb on this amp is very good, better than that of any of the other tube amps in this price range like the Fender Junior amps. Its fairly full up to 70% or so then gets flabby after that, so don't expect true Fender tube reverb or drippy surf style reverb. It works perfectly for me, as I like a good amount of reverb on my clean sounds.
The built in effects on the Special suck. It would have been better to just leave them off, or just give a decent chorus effect in place of UNusable multi-FX. The delay is too drastic and will turn off most players with a tasteful ear, and the flange is absolutely, terribly cheesy. I do not use them at all.
One more cool feature is that rather than hardwire the speaker to the amp, Epiphone purposely used 1/4" connections that can be dissconnected to use the 8 ohm output to drive a seperate cab in place of the stock 10". The stock speaker is not bad, but I did get some good results by driving the speakers of a 212 combo I had laying around. Its cool to have the option of driving different configurations, so its harder to outgrow this amp.