Western red cedar sits at a different point on the tonewood spectrum than the Sitka spruce found on most of Taylor's catalog. Spruce's higher stiffness-to-weight ratio gives it a wider dynamic range and a higher volume ceiling, but the top needs a harder attack to fully open up and reach that ceiling. Cedar is softer and less dense, so it responds with more of its full resonance at a lighter touch — a fingerstyle pass or a quiet chord voicing gets more out of a cedar top immediately than it would out of spruce, at the tradeoff of somewhat less headroom when you dig in as hard as you can.
Neo-tropical mahogany back and sides compound that same character rather than offsetting it. Indian rosewood, the wood most associated with Taylor's 400, 600, and 700 Series, produces a wide, complex overtone series underneath the fundamental note, the harmonic sprawl that reads as big on a recording. Mahogany trims that complexity down to something drier and more direct, putting more emphasis on the fundamental and the initial attack transient than on a long ringing tail. Paired with cedar's softer response, the 514ce lands on a genuinely warmer, rounder, more immediate voice than a spruce-and-rosewood guitar at the same price point — not a lesser version of that sound, a different one.
The Grand Auditorium body underneath splits the difference between a dreadnought's bass push and a grand concert's fingerstyle balance, the same silhouette that makes the shape Taylor's best-selling body across the whole catalog. On the 514ce, that balanced body shape gives cedar's immediacy somewhere to sit without getting boomy in the low end, since mahogany keeps the bass response controlled rather than blooming outward the way rosewood's harmonic complexity can at higher volumes.
Scalloped V-Class bracing with a Relief Rout is a natural complement to that tonewood pairing rather than a change bolted on separately. Standard V-Class bracing already redirects a top's vibration into two angled beams for longer sustain and true intonation up the neck. Scalloping shaves mass from those struts so the top responds with more nuance at a lighter touch, and the Relief Rout — a channel milled into the top near the soundhole — opens additional freedom of movement right where cedar's responsiveness matters most. The result is a top that tracks a light fingerstyle touch closely while still holding onto V-Class's sustain and projection when a player does dig in.
Taylor Claria's redesigned preamp is voiced for a fuller, more natural low end when plugged in than Expression System 2 delivers, carrying the 514ce's warmer acoustic character through a PA instead of thinning it into a brighter, more generic amplified tone. For a player choosing the 514ce specifically for its cedar-and-mahogany voice, that matters more than it would on a brighter spruce guitar where some loss of low-end warmth through a pickup is less noticeable.
See the full 500 Series collection for more on why cedar and mahogany is a distinct tonal lane in Taylor's lineup, or browse the complete range in our Taylor Guitars collection.
Every 514ce sold through The Acoustic Shoppe ships under the full Dread-Not Guarantee: a 30-day in-home trial to make sure it's the right fit, a full year to trade it in toward anything else in the store for 90% of your purchase price back in credit — on this $2,799 guitar, that's $2,519 in store credit, so your real downside exposure is under $280 over a full year — professional setup and inspection by a certified in-house tech before it ships, and a free Bluetooth humidity monitoring kit to help protect the cedar top through seasonal humidity swings.
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.
