An absolutely fantastic bass. I was an Artisan Deluxe C4 owner/player, so I new the outstanding professional quality of Cort instruments.
Construction/built quality: Absolutely perfect in all aspects, frets, finishing, paintwork. A tad heavier than the C4, due to the wider neck, but still perfectly balanced, no neck dive, quite the opposite. Sturdy construction with neck-through string design and fantastic tone transfer (you feel the vibrations on your thigh/body)! Very comfortable body shape, and sturdy controls without crackles. All in black! It arrived well-packaged, fully set up and intonated, only needed tuning, with a stamped card from the technicians who assembled/set it up for every step of the process! I will only adjust the action to be a bit lower and the pickups to be much higher, as I use them as thumb anchor whilst playing, and also makes the tone more aggressive (or at least louder?). A luxury professional level instrument, with a tiny price. Cort makes instruments and parts for most other companies (looking at you proud Fender, Ibanez, Schecter, Spector, Sterling, ... owners), so if you don't care about the decal at the end of the neck, this is a bass better than instruments that cost SEVERAL multiples of its price. (Mind you: same electronics Bartolini pickups and Markbass preamp as Cort's own B and A series which is more expensive = same sound!).
Looks: Truth be told, colour variations is what is missing from the otherwise excellent C4/C5 series. As I already have the C4 in black, and the specific blue is not appealing to me (to me it's like a pale "dentist waiting area blue"), I went with red with moderate excitement about the colour, as I had no other options. However, I was not disappointed when I opened the box!!! This particular bass in red looks even better in real life, it's stunning! The jatoba fretboard is actually much more reddish/terracotta than it appears on screens (looks more yellowing/brown in the pictures), so it looks fabulous up close as it just fits perfectly with the candy red of the body. It is in fact darker and much more reddish that the jatoba fretboard of my black C4 (which has now long been ebonised black as it was too light/yellowish). I was planning to ebonise this neck too, but this is out of the question now! It's a looker!
Tones/versatility/usability: The default/flat tone of this bass is very modern and with the nickel Daddario strings, it is thick, bass-y, very mid-rich and can be aggressive (if desired), cutting through the mix even without distortion, but without being ridiculously bright. The factory strings retain their brightness for a very long tine (at least the C4 did), without sounding neither scooped nor harshly bright. However, you can do pretty much every tone you want. The B string specifically is thunderous!!! Going from 4 to 5 string needed no practice at all, as string spacing is basically the same as the C4.
Cons: This series would benefit from a larger colour palette of options. Also, it is a bit annoying that in passive mode there is no tone option, only volume and pick up balancer works. Ideally I'd like a tone control / low pass filter, but as I only use it in active mode (with passive being a backup only if the 9V battery runs out mid-gig), it is not a issue.
