Harley Benton PJ-4 HTR Deluxe Series

First off, I'm happy. The bass looks and sounds great. Nice finish, transparent red (though wood grain is nothing to see), pickguard is much nicer than the photo. Pickups sound good, though the J pickup is quite weak.

Straight out of the box the setup was OK but needed work (I am an experienced guitar tech). Neck relief was good, nut slots too high, string action was high but easily fixed once the nut work was done. Fret levelling was fine but crowning and polish was poor. Fret ends were very nicely finished though.

Fingerboard wood is poor and I hope they do better in future. Webpage says both "roseacer" and "rosewood". It is *not* rosewood. It's an ugly weird grey-black, like ebony but coarser grained. Mine seemed rough, dry, and brittle. The masking tape I used to protect the board while polishing the frets raised the grain and made it feel rougher. I used micro mesh pads to smooth and then thoroughly oiled it.

As I said, out of the box it was playable and if they were all like that or better at this price I would recommend. With my skills I now have a bass that plays great, but if charging for my time at my standard rates, that would cost 60€ extra.

tl;dr It's playable out of the box, and better than I expected at this price, but can be improved and needs some work to play well.

EDIT: 2 1/2 years on and I regret buying it. It's been in storage for a year and much of the year before that it was just collecting dust and taking up space. Like so many Harley Benton products I've seen (I am pro guitar tech) it can take so much work getting these to play well that you are better off spending more money in the first place. I should have just bought a Squier or Sterling by Music Man.

First of all it shouldn't even be possible to sell a bass this cheap. The price comes with downsides in terms of QC. My bass had several problems including loose input jack, loose pots and pick guard screws that were very poorly angled. The bass was on the other hand playable but the action was a tad high and it required some extensive care to make it fully comfortable. I hade to level the frets and tighten most of the electronic before getting it to play comfortable. I'm still a bit impressed a bass can be this cheap at all. The neck felt a bit flimsy and required a lot of truss rod adjustments over time but the tuners work just fine.

I would've given 5 stars, but out of the box, the head of the truss rod was stripped. The wrench provided is useless. Instead of returning the bass, I spent $110 more on a Mighty Mite unlined fretless neck with a mirror finished jet black Ebonol fingerboard. It took some fitting but this bass is now a one of a kind killer looking & sounding fretless bass, thanks to ME. I was really surprised at the lack of quality control at Thomann. I'm giving Thomann another try by ordering an acoustic fretless bass, & it is already grossly late for delivery. I'm so aggravated at this point, I'll probably refuse delivery, that is if it ever gets here.

This was my first bass. I am a huge rock fan and i wanted something that looked good and that had a sound quality that would allowed me to play live gigs and this seemed to fit my requests.
The neck is really confortable, your hand can go up and down easily. The pickups configuration allows you to get a lot of different sounds from it, wich make this bass pretty good to fit in any stile of music. The woods seem to have good quality too, once the bass looks to have a cool sound too even when it's not pluged in into an amp.
Seems to be a solid bass in general.
It's not the best bass in the world but it is a great bass to start.