ESP LTD Viper-400 B BLKS

Pros:
1. The pickups sound good. Plenty of articulation, good cleans, nice chime, varied tonal options. You can make it sound sweet and it'll work for a variety of styles. Especially drone/doom/death/sludge. They're quite bassy but bright at the same time. A world of crushing and searing notes opens up to you. Play it through an Earthquaker Plumes pushing a ProCo Rat, you'll see what I mean.
2. Easy access to high notes once you find your ideal playing position.
3. Could be merely subjective but I get the feeling this body design gives you plenty of sustain.
4. Came factory-tuned B to B with .10-.64 strings which were OK. I don't have any complaints about bridge or saddle adjustment; action was reasonably low and the guitar was in tune with itself out of the box. I had it setup for A standard with .13-.72 and now it sings.
5. Holds tuning reasonably well. Not perfect by any measure, but it's not a $10K guitar. One is willing to forgive a few flaws.

Cons:
1. The guitar arrived with a spent 9V battery, so it sounded really odd at first. When I went to replace the battery for the first time, I noticed how unnecessarily hard it is to open the battery compartment. You need a Phillips screwdriver, and then something thin and comparably sharp to lift the lid out, because your fingernails won't do the job.
2. Neck dive is definitely something to watch out for. You kind of have to fight this guitar until you find some sweet spot, some kind of equilibrium. That may take a little while.
3. The frets on mine were excessively salient and I ended up cutting myself. You get the feeling they had spare frets for a wider neck lying around and they just used those. That's a black mark against LTD.
4. Either I got unlucky with the batteries or the EMGs are gluttons for voltage. The battery I put in barely lasted a month, whereas a 9V on my Schecter Demon 7 will work optimally for months at a time.
5. The machine head for the high E (as in standard A, A D G C E A) is a bit of a black sheep. Doesn't hold the tuning quite as its siblings do.

Conclusion:
This is neither pro nor con but it's my first 6-string baritone and that long of a scale takes some getting used to. Bear that in mind before you make your purchase.

Not great, not terrible, but OK at a few things. Have it set up by someone you trust and it'll grow on you. It's a decent instrument and if you tweak it, it will serve you well.

Baritone, ich wollte unbedingt eine Baritone 6-Saiter in Mahagoni und aktiven EMG 81/85 haben. Und das habe ich auch bekommen!
Sie kam als Retour mit Gebrauchtspuren, die sich allerdings nur auf die Saiten bezogen. Sehr gut eingestellt und vollkommen in Ordnung, keine Kratzer oder sonstiges, ich war positiv überrascht.
Habe die Gitarre auf Drop C gestimmt und schon beim Stimmen erfahren, wie sehr die Schwingung der Saiten (ohne Sound) sich durch den Hals über den Korpus bemerkbar machen. Eingestöpselt in AXE FX III und ein cleaner Sound erzeugt angenehm basslastige Klänge mit Obertönen, je nach PU unterschiedlich, der 85er klingt einfach nur wunderbar. Auf Higain Metal und 81er macht sich ein sehr amtlich fetter Tiefstimmer bemerkbar, der definiert und einfach nur powervoll klingt. Der 85er klingt im Higain nicht weniger energisch, jedoch mit mehr Bässe und weniger Höhen. Beide haben hier ihre volle Berechtigung, den Rest macht das Holz, Form und eben die lange Mensur. Aber die Gitarre will festgehalten werden (Ich spiele über einen breiten gepaddeten Ledergurt von HB), da sie sehr kopflastig ist. Wer damit nicht zurecht kommt, sollte sich die Viper nicht kaufen.

Positiv:
+Sound
+Bespielbarkeit
+Mechaniken

Negativ:
-Kopflastig