pro's
- good hardware, nice smooth tuners, bridge, preamp is quiet except when boosting treble a lot
- preamp is actually the roswell gmp3, so room to mod without buying a different preamp :-)
- nearly impossible to see the body is made up of multiple wood pieces
- balance is rather good, no head-dive
- conductive paint in control cavity
- very versatile regarding sound (nice jazz sound in passive/coil split mode, growl with just the humbucker, very full bodied sound with jazz neck together with Humbucker)
con's
- bass and treble controls were reversed from what i'm used to (order of pots: volume, balance, bass, treble). however, upon inspection of the preamp, it seems the pots were connected the wrong way around on the preamp board, as the pot that was acting as bass had a sticker ' treble' on it; simple switch around of the connectors fixed this.
- nut not seated properly causing the B string to float above the 0-fret
- jack socket very poor, needs replacement directly as it keeps coming loose by plugging/unplugging cable (bad thread)
neutral
- the block inlays aren't actually inlays but rather it seems some kind of epoxy was poured in, which seams to have shrunken slightly, so you can feel the blocks a bit. doesn't affect playability.
- neck-body joint is OK-ish, not a perfect fit, but no big gaps either.
- balance pot is not very fine-tuned, all control-room is VERY close to the centre-detent, so if you like a typical jazz 70% neck 100% bridge sound, that takes some practice to dial in (perhaps the wrong type potmeter taper was used?)
all in all, compared to the HB JB75 i also own, i think the hardware justifies the price bump, and the problems found i personally can fix, but i must say i was expecting better quality control on a E400,- bass. (the similarly priced marcus miller/sire V3-5 has much nicer finish)
