Harley Benton Enhanced MP-4EB Lake Blue

Hi all. I am a seasoned player, collector, modifier, and builder of electric basses and have been doing so for well over 40 years now. Curiosity got the better of me when surfing the web and reading about and watching videos about this bass.This is by far the cheapest bass I have bought new and I have had it at home for a day after it arrived yesterday afternoon. First off, the Harley Benton MP-4EB looks fantastic and much better than on the Thomann website . It really is a very pretty bass. The blue is a fine metallic and does have a shimmer to it, really nice. No orange peel at all and the head stalk in the same finish is always a treat. There is however a finish flaw on my head stalk which is simply sloppy and certainly should not have passed inspection. The finish on the neck is a flat poly nicely done and feels smooth. The fret board looks great, nice and dark with a nice polished sheen, no sanding marks and the block position inlays certainly add to the look and are done nicely, no raised blocks... good stuff. The neck is bound in white plastic but looks a little cheap and there are some signs of scouring and marking. The pick guard is 3 ply fastened with chrome screws.. looks great. The stainless frets seem to be good so far and I have not found any high frets or any sharp fret ends so no issues there. This bass has a Zero fret and that is a nice touch however the nut is not placed very well and is not flush with the neck It is not a great issue but still. The neck also has a MusicMan type truss rod nut and to be honest all basses should have this, over the years I have repaired many truss rods due to wrong tooling and you cant go wrong with this truss nut.. two thumbs up!!! The hardware appointments are more than to be expected on a bass of this value and more than adequate, bridge is good, string retainers are nice and as a string through bass the ferrules are nicely inserted and flush with the body, the tuners are ok but will do the job i'm sure. Upon inspection on the bench there was a pick guard screw loose, It would not tighten so after removing the pick guard I found that the wood had split under the guard and broken off, so the first repair had to be done, I also found that the jack plate had a screw that was protruding in front on the insert point and had to be screwed home. The jack plat is the round concave type and is a nice touch. These are things that Thomann's inspection guy certainly missed and If I were not living in Canada I would have certainly returned the bass on these points alone. So after all that time to plug in! The bass was well set up, action good and low but the strings were terrible so I restrung it with a set of D'addario NYXL's. I am very anal about strings ( we all have our string preferences I'm sure) and the mounted D'addario EXL155SL .045 - .105. are better suited to binding up the exhaust pipe on my old Dodge Caravan than to be used in a musical fashion. The neck profile is not my cup of tea, slow and fatiguing is the word I would use but my muscle memory may need to get used to it and time will only tell. But hey, how does it sound? Well the neck pick up is alive and well, quite nice, lots of beefy low end tones to be had BUT the bridge pick up is dead, out of phase and there is a large volume drop when soloed, simply bad and really should not be on any bass guitar regardless of price. The pre amp is 2 band active(V/B/T /T) and really is no better with large amounts of hiss with even the slightest amount of treble boost and there is no amount of tweaking the bridge pickup to make it sound any wear close to reasonable. The pot detents are good and firm. The volume pot is push pull and in the up position it is passive but no tone control in passive mode... Meh! The battery compartment is ...hmmm cheap. Shielding is conductive paint and the pick ups are mounted on neoprene rubber. I gave this bass four stars out of the 5 available for looks and for appointments like the zero fret, bridge and string retainer, truss nut etc. It weighs in at 9 pounds or just over 4 KG's and the balance is exceptionally good but sound wise it is a fail and I think that Harley Benton sells these on looks rather than going a little bit further and getting the tone and electrics right. I will keep the Harley Benton Enhanced MP-4EB and mod it to my specs( which will end up costing more than the bass...lol) as I think that this is a modifiers dream bass but to label it a Pro Series is a little rich in my honest opinion. but she is oh so pretty!