I've never met a strat I didn't like, but I haven't really played a great many of them apart from the ones I've owned (and the ones I've tried on the way to making a purchase). When I first started out I had a Tokai strat and a 50W Marshall combo... it was too much for me to handle back then, so I moved on to late-'80s Ibanez humbucker-equipped metal machines and an amp with a master volume that let me turn things down a bit. I've been back in the Fender fold since '92.



I never had much of an opinion one way or the other concerning big headstocks, but my '66 reissue strat has one and I've come to like it a lot. I guess I can see how some might think of it as the flared jeans of the guitar world, but that's not so bad... unless you're a punk. Heh. If the large headstock was introduced so early on in the piece (a year after CBS took over) it would seem strange that it would be intended to compensate for bad hardware, as I imagine there wouldn't have been enough time for feedback and response. I could easily be wrong, though. Maybe there was a maple surplus at the end of the '60s or something. It seems like a cosmetic change to me, easily made and having the fringe benefit of being marketable as a sustain-increasing gimmick...