Enhanced MP-4EB Lake Blue : A mixed bag

This one went back because of a slightly misaligned bridge. Other impressions:

Beautiful looks (maybe apart from the huge headstock if you ask me).

Chunky neck made of lovely maple with a soft feel. It felt great to me apart from several sharp fret ends. These need attention and the frets need a polish as well. On the positive side the stainless frets were level and the neck was straight (which is after all more important). Strings came with a very high action but I was able to adjust them down to a more playable level without any buzz. I also like the zero fret which is a rare feature especially in this price range.

This bass is fairly heavy for a 4-string. Ergonomics and balance is good though.

The push pull volume knob had a lot of play (a dead zone) which made it feel cheap. I didn't play the bass enough to make a final judgement on the pickups and preamp but I'm pretty sure that the pots and preamp would have been replaced soon if I had kept it. Not sure about the pickups, they might be fine.

All in all it's a nice looking bass with some premium features but in this case it was let down by poor fit and finish in some areas. I personally don't mind giving the frets some love on bass in this price range but a misaligned bridge and inaccurately drilled string holes underneath it would be too much of a hassle to make perfect. It wasn't so bad that it influenced playability much but I like my strings to align nicely with the neck and the pole pieces of the pickups. They didn't on this sample.

In the end I decided not to have it replaced with an identic model since a perfect one would still be slightly heavier than I prefer and it would likely also require some mods to the electronics to make me 100% happy. If you can live with that it's a lot of bass for the money though. Just cross your fingers and hope that you get a good one since the finish and quality control does not seem to be better here compared to Harley Benton's cheaper models.