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ORIGINAL: Arash

Of course one should play an actual flamenco guitar with the woods your described before forming a final opinion, but i doubt it will be really suitable for us?.

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ORIGINAL: Ricardo

anders won't pipe in here, but there is a chance he will admit that luthiers build to customer demands and as far as flamenco goes, we players don't want "long sustain and complex harmonics"...we want the opposite of that. A soft springy sound board we can bang on like a drum head skin, no sustain and very few noticeable upper harmonic noise, crystal clear fundamental with punch and pop and bite and a light weight construction and feel. All the opposite of what your petrified wood description sounds like. sure a fun experiment though.

Ricardo

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The biggest secret regarding Stradivari is that there is no secret.

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ORIGINAL: Sean

Kauri has been discussed before, it can make a nice Blanca.
Usable Ancient Kauri is not petrified, petrified wood is stone, and stone is a poor material choice for guitars.
Ancient Kauri that is usable will have more silicate then normal Kauri from permineralization; the process that eventually leads to petrification, turning to stone.
Perhaps the regular Kauri behaves more like a Blanca, and the denser harder ancient more like a Negra. All woods vary so this would be case by case.
There are plenty of tropical woods readily available, that have high silica content, and are too hard and dense, to produce a good Flamenco sound.

Redwood is highly overrated.
It's marketed as having the best qualities of both Spruce and Cedar.
On paper that sounds like a superior product to me; the reality is very different.
Redwood dates back over 40 years as a top wood, in the Spanish guitar.
If it was as good as its billed, you would see it only on the top models in Spain, with huge markups do to its rarity.
You could market Redwood just as easily as, lacking the sparkle of Spruce and warmth of Cedar, but then it wouldn't sell as well.
Sinker Redwood a harder, denser version, even better for Flamenco? Doubtful.

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What few people seem to realize (or care to admit) is that of the 600-700 (depending on which expert you choose to believe) surviving Stradivari instruments, only a small percentage of them actually see any kind of regular use. Most of them reside in museum display cases or bank vaults. They aren't all sonic masterpieces by any stretch of them imagination. Another point that is only rarely mentioned is that virtually every one of them has been considerably modified from its original state plus having been subjected to numerous repairs along with often heavy restoration/conservation work. The structural modifications (longer and more angled necks, taller bridges, longer and heavier bass bars, different tailpieces, much higher tension strings, etc.) have altered their sound considerably, so much so that one has to wonder if their current sound is mostly due to Stradivari or to the repair/restoration people who've modified, repaired and maintained them over the years.
There is only one existing Stradivari instrument that has avoided modification, a very large tenor viola that was part of a set of instruments that Stradivari built in 1690 for the Medici family. Supposedly everything, except for the strings on it, is original. It resides in the Instutito Cherubini in Florence, Italy.

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an instinctive 'ear' for sound that in our age of constant humming and concealed noise

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ORIGINAL: Erik van Goch

but if the traditional flamenco guitar is so perfect i wonder why people like Paco de Lucia (who initiated and plays flamenco/classical hybrids to start with)
still feel the need to use so much reverb (despite the fact it does indeed kill rasgueados).

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ORIGINAL: Arash

What do you exactly mean with "reverb"? In his concerts? In his CD recordings?

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ORIGINAL: Erik van Goch

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ORIGINAL: Arash

What do you exactly mean with "reverb"? In his concerts? In his CD recordings?

In Paco's case i meant the overdose of "echo" he (and many others) applies during life concerts. I specifically choose him because the last concerts i attended (many many years ago) he used a kind of echo that was really total crap. Vicente on the other hand has the most perfect stage-sound one can imagine so it's not fair to question the flamenco guitar as such. I merely wanted to question the reluctancy of some to even considerer a possible plus of a more richer sound of the guitar itself, while at the same time so many use artificial ways like echo to create a more "richer" sound. Demands can change when alternatives are offered. Quite recently a personalized bow instrument was ordered by a player based on a no longer favored/build historical model. That order did raise some eyebrows with the builder, but his willingness to build the instrument turned out to be a fruitful investment since it became one of his most wanted models after a couple of professional players loved its playability and sound.