If I had to get rid of all but one - I would probably keep the Taylor
Phil Heywood - the "best sound" player I linked youtube above - is playing a Taylor, has for years. He owns a couple of others - including a cedar top Guild for slide etc - but that's his main one.
I can't enjoy an electric - I'm too clumsy to get any good sounds out of them, they don't allow good volume control, they sustain unless actively stopped, and the feel is too much like pushing buttons, or working a synthesizer. Too wimpy, essentially, not enough drum - they don't seem like guitars at all to me, but some different instrument.
Long ago, I bought my first good guitar from a boutique shop in a wealthy neighborhood - a one man operation that had a large array of different kinds of guitars hanging in a humidity controlled room. Thirty or forty different builders, plus the standard brands. He had a couple of sizes of 1930s Martins, a Gibson Hummingbird and J-200 from the right years, the famous ones. All with newer strings, all tuned, all set up to play. The guy's schtick was to sit you in a chair and hand you instruments, one at a time, and have you take or leave them, sift and compare. After you had the room's selection winnowed to eight or nine, you left - and came back a few days later, to play off the eight or nine. It came down to two, with me, both clean and clear, strong in the bass and in beauty - one more loud and dramatic and powerful, the other more warm and expressive and balanced. (Neither one expensive, by the way, which was lucky) I chose the power, but I said to him - and meant it - that if I were a better human being I would prefer the other. And he told me that that particular guitar - my second choice - was almost everybody's second or third choice.
He eventually gave it as a contest prize in some promotion. It was a Taylor - one of the early ones, before fame, when the name was just another builder's name on the wall with thirty others.
I own two working guitars, and the remains of that first one (still plays, even sounds pretty good, but unrecognizable - different neck, braces shaved, holes cut into the back, reamed out soundhole, overstrung and hammered and victimized by all my big ideas). A six recently built to fit by David Seaton, a secondhand 12 built long ago for somebody else by Bozidar Podunavac.
