Every Taylor top wood trades off the same handful of properties, and cedar sits at a genuinely different point on that spectrum than spruce does. Sitka spruce — the top wood under the 400 Series and most of Taylor's catalog — has a higher stiffness-to-weight ratio, which gives it more dynamic range and more raw volume ceiling, but it also means the top needs a harder attack to fully open up. Western red cedar is softer and less dense, so it's already close to its full resonant response at a light touch. A fingerstyle player who never digs in hard enough to make a spruce top bloom will hear a cedar top respond immediately instead, at the cost of some of the headroom spruce offers when you do dig in.
That same logic carries through to the back and sides. Neo-tropical mahogany is a denser, more overtone-suppressing wood than Indian rosewood, the pairing found on the 400, 600, and 700 Series. Rosewood's harmonic complexity produces a wide, almost piano-like overtone series underneath the fundamental note; mahogany trims that complexity down to a drier, more compressed voice that emphasizes the fundamental and the immediate attack transient rather than a long tail of ringing overtones. Cedar and mahogany together compound in the same direction — softer attack, faster response, a warmer and rounder overall character — rather than one wood countering the other's tendencies.
The practical result is a guitar built for a specific kind of player: someone doing fingerstyle work, quieter accompaniment, or recording close to a microphone, where a cedar top's immediacy at low playing volume matters more than a spruce top's ceiling at full strum. It's a genuinely different tonal lane than the 400 Series sitting right next to it in the catalog, not a softer or lesser version of the same voice.
The 514ce Next Generation carries Scalloped V-Class bracing with a Relief Rout, the same bracing refinement found across Taylor's newest builds, which lets the top move even more freely at the fundamental than standard V-Class alone — a natural complement to cedar's already-responsive character rather than working against it. Taylor Claria's redesigned preamp is voiced for a fuller, more natural low end when plugged in, carrying that acoustic warmth through a PA instead of thinning it out.
See the full model page for the 514ce Next Generation, or browse the complete lineup in our Taylor Guitars collection. At $2,799, the 514ce clears the $1,000 threshold for the full Dread-Not Guarantee — a 30-day in-home trial, a full year to trade it in for 90% of your purchase price in store credit, professional setup and inspection, and a free humidity monitoring kit.
The Acoustic Shoppe is an Authorized Taylor Premier Dealer and Gold Label Advantage Dealer. Every instrument ships after a full 23-point professional inspection by our in-house repair tech. As a nine-time consecutive NAMM Top 100 Dealer, we handle warranty concerns directly on your behalf.
