want an A mandolin,but which one of these two ?.

[mandolin tony]

thinking of getting an A style mandolin. like these two, Kentucky km-162 & eastman md-305. please help can't afford both. want to play bluegrass & folk with it,so what do you guys think.

[mrmando]

Pretty close call. I gather Kentuckys have improved a lot since I owned a KM180B. I'd probably still go with the Eastman.

[mandolin tony]

I was just thinking may be the tuners are better on the Kentucky ?.

[Charles E.]

Tuners might be better on the Kentucky, I don't know. There has been some dicussion on the Cafe about concerns with the arching on the top's of the Eastman 305. Recent instruments have the peak of the arch well behind the bridge location, forming a weird buldge. I, personally would not buy a mandolin with that trait.

[yankees1]

If you can, play both first.

[roysboy]

Either of those would be an excellent choice. My experience is that the tuners on my Kentucky 150 give me less trouble than the ones on my md 305 did.

[mandolin tony]

thanks, I think I will get the Kentucky. why spend more money & have to upgrade tuners.

[bmac]

I suspect either set of tuners are good. If they weren't manufacturers would long ago have dropped the malfunctioning brand. Tuners simply tune the individual string and hold it... Nothing else.... If the string is installed incorrectly the tuners will appear to be not working correctly, but the problem is almost always an incompetent installation of the individual string. See frets.com for proper method of stringing a mandolin.

[Charles E.]

Bart, I have an Eastman 315 and the tuners are very poorly machined. I truly have never seen a tuner with more "slop". I ended up replacing them with tuners from Stewart Macdonald and it is a big improvement.

[mandolin tony]

Hi Charley,what brand of tuners did you buy ?.

[Charles E.]

Stew Mac's Golden age tuners.

[jmp]

I played a MD305 yesterday and it had a nice full sound and good feel. I was trying out several mandolins and used the MD305 one as the "baseline". For a new pac rim instrument, it seemed like a good instrument. I liked it better than the vintage Martin, newer Big Muddy, new Gretch, and mid-90's Gibson A5 that I tried. Was not better than the 1919 A3. Did not compare it to any Kentucky models however.

[allenhopkins]

Just my 2¢: wouldn't choose a mandolin based on perceived quality of the tuners. Appearance, "feel," overall sound, etc. are things that are hard/impossible to change (well, you can do a lot of sound tweaking by selecting different strings and picks, but the baseline remains the baseline).

As said above, 99% of the mandolin tuners I've owned or tried have been within acceptable ranges. The other 1% were installed on old Regals, and my expectations were modest. Concur in the advice to play examples of each mandolin, if possible. I own a bunch of Eastmans, no Kentuckies currently, but doubt you'd go far wrong with either. More a question of what you like.