Harley Benton HBO-850SB

My HBO-850 came when promised and has been a real pleasure to play the last 2 weeks. This guitar really does look good and the finish was great. A real close inspection showed 1 teeny-weeny-weeny blemish under the lacquer but I need my reading glasses on to see it! The frets were prepared well, the neck was setup perfectly with just the slightest amount of relief in it. The guitar does get you close to that Ovation sound from my experience of playing them in shops. It perhaps lacks a little depth compared with the real thing but this gives you a powerful sound for a shallow bowl body. I didn't buy this to use through a PA or a DI but can tell you the pick ups work and the preamp gives a good degree of control but the default sound of the piezo pickup is BRIGHT so you will be taming it with a heavy cut to the mids. All the pros I have listed here make this a clear winner I am happy to recommend.

The cons are small and should not put you off unless you believe you can get a truly perfect guitar for less than a ton. Firstly the string action at the 12th fret was well over 2mm from 1st to 6th strings. Bar chords from 7th position up were therefore a bit tiresome and solo playing required some good technique! An hour working on the bridge with some 120 grit paper and refitting it to the guitar a couple of times to try it out has resulted in a perfectly fine setup for what I want with no rattles/buzzing and could go lower if needed. An upgrade I will try is a quality bone bridge (a Tusq bridge might make this even brighter and that may not be a good thing), Strings are fine and having played them in have lost some of the sharpness but I will invest in some coated strings for its next set. The finger board is just the slightest bit 'rough' on some fret positions so you feel the grain resisting the string if/as you bend it. Over time that raised grain will wear down naturally but I will see what some lemon oil after a light brush along the grain with steel wool will do to this.

My first experience of Thoman's in house brand has been good and I have since ordered a GS Travel mini for my daughter and had it delivered to her Uni abroad rather than take her Taylor equivalent (at 7 times the price!) with her.

I ordered this guitar several reasons. The most important reason was that the Thomann website said that the nut width was 45 mm. But when I received the guitar I measured the nut width and it was 43 mm, so that was a disappointment.

Another disappointment was with the tuning keys. I started playing the guitar right out of the box and it was very nice, but the strings on it were old and dirty and I also noticed that there was some corrosion on the base of one of the tuning keys. So, I decided to change the strings and as I was doing that I realized one of the tuning keys did not work. The tuning key for the D string did not hold tension so I could tune, whenever I turned the key it would release the tension and the string cannot be tuned. I took the guitar to a local luthier who told me that the tuning keys were dead and I had to buy a set of new tuning keys and have them installed by a luthier, which cost money.

These were major disappointments, but the guitar has a nice tone and overall OK for the price. But of course it would have been much better without the above problems.