Harley Benton RB-414CS Classic Series

I know you shouldn't expect much for this price, but I was initially lulled by overall very good build quality. The neck, in particular, feels really nice (despite the gloss finish)… rolled edges, absolutely no fret sprout, level frets. The problem with this bass is the pickups.

Forget the dumb (but "traditional") design of the pickup cover over the bridge pickup. The pickup itself has no cover and even has exposed wires, and it has terrible single-coil hum.

I was initially a fan of the neck humbucking pickup, until I tried to record with it and realized that the output on the G string is about half of the output on the D string, and there's no way to make individual adjustments on this pickup.

Add to that the terrible bridge design, with floating barrels for each string that can easily get lost when the strings are off, and a needlessly limited ability to adjust string height, and this bass is a bust. It's fine if you want something that looks vaguely like a you-know-what bass, and you're fine with replacing both pickups. But it's not really a usable instrument as-is.