Yes, there's no question the old original pre-'39 Nationals are the best. Even the new re-issues can't compare. No matter what they say about "using old dies and techniques, etc" in their construction, they just aren't the same. For one thing the production techniques are different, most importantly in the resonator-cones. Also being an engineer who is pretty familiar with old machinist and metal-working techniques, I can categorically say that outside of tech-museums like The Henry Ford Museum, etc. machines like the ones used then are not in existence any more, nor their operators, true craftsmen, who ran them with the kind of exacting expertise, almost an art-form, to make them do amazing things with such primative tooling. Also the material today is different. Back then the material-standards were very loose. If you wanted aluminum plate, you got aluminium plate. It might have had grandma's old pie tin thrown in with the fin-block of an old Indian motorcycle mixed with some new bauxite ore and anything else that might melt down in the smelter. No batch was the same, which is a major reason (especially back then) each cone had a very distinctive voice (or "quack" as many original National owners call it). Today, you order a batch of alumium and you'll get Duralum© or Alu-Sil©, etc mixed and smelted by a computer to exacting identical standards and proportions. You'll still find variations in the sound, but to a much more limited degree. The special character of "a good batch" is gone.
On the down-side, the old Nationals are a bit harder to play. Their necks are un-radiused, which is very awkward feeling to most modern guitarists who aren't used to them. The metal bodied ones were made of two separate materials at different times... "bell-brass" or "German-silver" (which is actually a tin alloy). I have two of the old Nationals myself, a 1937 Duolian and a 1938 Catalogue-O (the "Catalogue" designation means the Hawaiian-scene etching is omitted from the nickel-plating, to save costs. These were made for potential wholesale sales to second-distributors such as Sears and Roebuck or Montgomery Ward who would then sometimes add their own label and offer them through their mail-order catalogues. Back then, the US was still a mostly rural nation and a great deal of merchandise was ordered from mail-order catalogues. A bit of guitar-trivia: The Sears guitar brand-name "Silvertone" was originally used in its catalogues in the '30s as the name for the Dobro-National-made guitars it offered which were nickel-plated and thus of course were "silver-toned" in appearance.)
Tubescream, the Regal isn't a bad one for the money either. Almost as good (if not actually as good probably) as the Johnson in that price-range. I bought my daughter (who also plays) a new Regal. It's over five years old now and outside of a few
very minor repairs it still plays and sounds pretty good. Between the two, she preferred the feel of the Regal slightly, and so I bought that one. Yeah, Fender's is true-crap. Like they just took some really crap acoustic and just screwed on a cover-plate so it would "look cool" or something.
Thanks, Ive never actually gotten a chance to play a Regal. But I was told if I ordered from Guitar Center I could buy and if I didnt like it within 30 days I could return it. Ive played the Fender one, ughh.
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