I just looked up the specs. There are no transistors in there. I was pretty sure that was the case... the Artcore line is made the old school way. I own one of these:

http://www.ibanez.co...d=7&series_id=103

No transistors in it, either.

though perhaps if I were to put heavier acoustic strings on it might be all right, but it's not really an acoustic guitar in the way your bog-standard flat top is; it's got a piece of wood that travels all the way through the body behind the top to support the neck and pickups, and that severely curtails how loud it can be.

It's an electric guitar that has very different characteristics from a solid body electric because its body is far more resonant. This means that it doesn't handle loud volumes and distortion very well because it wants to take off into runaway unmanageable feedback. However, the floating bridge (it's a brass bridge on a piece of mahogany that rests on top of the soundboard and is only held in place by the pressure from the strings) and the quality woods do affect the sound made a little bit... but the simple truth is that pickups are more than 95% of the sound of an electric guitar. Still and all... pickups are just a magnet with wire wrapped around it a bunch of times, connected to the output jack with a couple of switches, potentiometers, and capacitors. In my rig overall, my amps are tube (I haven't used a transistor amp in years, and when I did it was an emergency where it was the only one available... I bought my first tube amp in 88 and never looked back), my distortion pedals are also tube driven, my crybaby has no transistors, there's one in my Morley fuzz wah (for the fuzz), there are transistors galore in my (analog) delay and flanger, and my tuning pedal is digital. I'd like to get a loop station, and that will be digital. Right tool for the job at hand is my basic philosophy on that; purity is for suckers when it comes to making nifty noises.