When i first got the mandolin i would say i was pleasantly suprised. I think the colour and finish of the body was bright, and it had a fair amount of depth.
The hardware, mainly the tuning pegs feel and look a little cheap, but they do the job. I'm sure you could upgrade these if you really wanted to.
Whilst tuning the top e strings they broke, on both Harley Benton Mandolins i have bought. I urge anyone buying one to invest in at least 2 sets of spare strings, as i think there is a high chance of strings breaking , when you first tune. If you don't you'll probably wish you did, when it does break. There are some Martin strings @ around 5 euro, so it's not going to break the bank.
I would like Thomann to ship with better strings, and just charge a couple more euro, to save hassle and time changing strings. I guess the only positive thing about the strings breaking was that it made me change strings, investigate the instrument, take off tailpiece,basically get to know the instrument more than i would have done.
I think the acoustic sound of the mandolin is pretty good. Quite woody, and sparkly, especially when the strings were changed.
The amplified tone of the instrument is again not bad. I plugged in and played into my soundcard without issue. As it's a passive pick up the gain has to be turned up lots, but that's to be expected.
Overall i would say for the price it is pretty good. I don't think it's fair to compare this to mandolins which cost 5 or 10 times as much. Of course they will be 'better'. One problem i have had with both mandolins is the tailpiece keeps falling off. It was really annoying. To solve the problem i put tailpiece on the ground, and hammered it on the edges/side, to close it up, and now it's super tight and not going anywhere.
I think if you want to try out a mandolin, and don't want to break the bank doing it, this is a good product to start with.
PROS_Cheap, not bad acoustic tone, good introduction to mandolin....
CONS_Tailpiece constantly falling off, bad strings, cheap hardware.....
