[BillC15]

I recently purchased a new Gibson ES-175 from my local music store, Alto Music. It's a dual humbucker gold hardware beauty. When I took it home and plugged it in after playing it in the store for quite some time, I soon noticed a strange buzzing that appeared to be coming either from the bridge or inside the body near or in between the pickups, definitely not fret buzz. Somehow I didn't hear it in the store. Though slightly present with single note picking, chords, especially muddier ones that cause more vibration naturally made the buzzing louder and last longer (maybe 1.5-2.5 seconds). It also seemed to be present both amplified and acoustically, though I'm quite certain it's not the pickups themselves. My best guesses were either the pickup springs buzzing against their screws or simply a loose wire inside the body making contact with the top of the body. So I took it in and had them attempt to diagnose it while getting a setup done, moving up from the factory installed 10s to the Daddario jazz medium set (11-56). When I came to pick it up, I checked it out in the store before just walking off with it. It's a good thing I did. With the new setup, the guitar played like a dream, but the buzzing was the same as it had been when I dropped it off. I talked with the tech, and he said he'd taken out the pickups and checked them, checked the springs (I think he installed new springs, not sure though) yet he hadn't found the problem. However, he had to ask me if the buzzing was coming through the amplifier. Isn't that his job, to test it through an amp?? DUH. Then he told me that "It's a jazz box, they're gonna buzz," which I don't buy at all. We're talking about a $2600 guitar here. Do you think Joe Pass or Pat Metheny dealt with buzzing in their ES-175s? Listen for yourselves. So I left it there and both the head of the guitar department there and the tech said they'd look it over more. The guitar department guy gives me a call later that night with no solution. He said they'd swapped out the bridge, he'd played it for about and hour trying to figure it out, but no luck. He said that the Steve Howe ES-175 they had there (which I had played before making this purchase) also buzzes, and again insisted that it's simply the nature of the instrument. To get a new one shipped to Also Music, he said it would be around 60 days because they're on back order. That's way too long for me because I have multiple concerts and auditions coming up in a few weeks. So I'm going back possibly tomorrow to see what I want to do about this mess, but I want some more opinions on this matter before I do. Is it truly in the nature of archtops or ES-175s more specifically to buzz in the body, or is there simply a stupid wire just hanging loose vibrating against the top that got past Gibson quality control? (By the way, sorry for the long post, I appreciate your reading it.)