This is Martin's top of the line guitar in the grand auditorium size. This acoustic guitar has East Indian rosewood sides and back, a spruce top, one-piece mahogany neck, and an ebony fretboard. There is double binding on the body, fretboard and peghead. Abalone inlay adorns the rosette.

The story of the Martin M models begins in the 1930s. Arch-top guitars were the big sellers of that decade. The dominant brands in the arch-top guitar market were Gibson, Epiphone, and (to a lesser extent) Gretsch. But Martin wanted a piece of that pie, too, and introduced three new shapes, designated C, R, and F, to claim their share. Still, none of the Martin arch-top models were ever very popular, since they lacked the size and power of the big models that dominated that market.

Martin's arch-top production stopped in 1941 and by the 1970s, their arch-top models were all but forgotten, when a few of the best independent luthiers discovered that the F models could be converted into very fine flat-top guitars. By 1977 the idea had made its way back to Martin Guitars so that they retrieved the old F model templates from storage and began production of the first M models.