5 String Silent Electric Bass Hollow Body, With a padded gig bag

I've bought other $200 basses before, and you'd be silly not to expect some sort of problem with it. Poor fit and finish, iffy components, absolutely horrid strings. But you get it because it was cheap and you can upgrade it and make it what you want. This one is going to take a LOT of work to make it what I want. First thing, the electronics didn't want to work out of the box - fortunately a little re-seating of the cables inside helped fix that. What's not so good is the really, REALLY bad job with the binding on the neck -- it's not pretty. I can sand the fingerboard and treat it with orange oil to make it look better, but fixing the sloppy work where the fingerboard doesn't quite meet the binding is going to be a little harder. I think this is also the first bass I've ever seen that uses skinny little guitar frets.I'm not going to tell you not to buy one, but expect to do a lot of work on it to get it up to snuff. I'll update this later after I try cleaning it up - just in case something else rears it's ugly little head.UPDATE: I get to church this morning and notice the strings are all loose at the headstock. I follow them down, only to discover the bridge had come off. Glue, and 2 screws were somehow unable to hold the tension of a set of fairly light gauge strings. I should send it back - but I've already invested to much time and bought too many accessories for it. I'm also moderately experienced in working on guitars (no expert of course, but I have built a bass (almost) from scratch).And I am telling you not to buy it now....ANOTHER UPDATE: They sent me a replacement, no quibbles or arguments - so that was nice. It's also why I gave them an extra star - for the customer service. The replacement bass is not much of an improvement over the faulty one. The binding at the neck looks better, although they skimped on scraping the binding (I'm not going to mess with it because it's been sprayed with poly and I don't want to mess with redoing that). The output jack seems a little more stable as well, but it already looks as though the bridge isn't fastened down very well. I'll live with it, because I can take care of it ahead of time and it shouldn't be a problem.The seller seems to be helpful and willing to make good, it's just this bass was not the best of products to begin with. BUT, if you can take care of guitars, you might be able to make something intriguing out of this -- that's what I'm going to do.

Like the other review, this bass needed work. The fretwork is awful...rough and almost ground to the fingerboard at the ends. I will polish them later.I took care of the sharp fret ends, and slightly rolled the binding edges. The truss rod needed a little tightening. The high nut needed quite a bit of cutting. The bridge wasn't bad, but needs to be lowered a LITTLE on the treble side.What do you know, the bass plays well now...low action, and feels great. The neck is chunkier than I like, but is pretty comfortable.The electronics are usable. The tone control is a strange "tilt" type. At the low end it boosts low end, but there's still a lot of treble. At the high end, the bass drops out as the treble increases. The volume changes the tone as you turn it down, darkening the tone. I will likely replace the preamp, either with a three band, or use an acoustic guitar preamp. (This will get rid of the headphone circuit, but I really don't need that.)For my own comfort I will add a pickguard to make my right hand happy. Small point.It's worth what I paid, even with the bad fretwork and sloppy binding. It is a decent player now after an hour's work.