ST-25TH Firemist : Feature-packed anniversary guitar almost perfect

I've been playing this guitar for a little over a month now and I have to say for the money I've spent on the guitar it plays and sounds unbelievably good. After a little bit of waiting for the guitar to arrive (month and a half) my first impressions were excellent, the setup was fine, the guitar was very comfortable, the neck and finish were beautifully done (roasted maple neck and the awesome firemist finish which definitely looks better in person). I had two minor problems at the start, the first one being the tremolo bar which was pretty hard to pop into the bridge hole (a fair amount of force was needed, despite me being scared of breaking it I managed to do it). The second problem/annoyance was the plastic protective foil (for some reason a double foil was applied), which was pretty hard to remove from the guitar, as is the case with many strat-style guitars (you need to remove the knobs).

As for the sound, I am REALLY impressed with the pickups, the neck and middle singlecoils sound very nice, but I am most impressed with the hot rail style humbucker in the bridge position, it kicks really hard (and also has a coil split mode).

Everything mentioned so far indicates that this guitar is definitely a steal for the price (oh and yeah, did I mention it has locking tuners?), which I certainly have to confirm, but I am sorry to say I had one major problem with the guitar - its tremolo system has very bad tuning stability (regardless of no usage of the tremolo bar). I've spent an additional 50 euro for a professional luthier to fix it, which he managed to do partially, but still, now in rehearsals I don't have to tune between each song, but between every two songs. It seems like eventually the only solution is to block off the bridge to turn it into a hardtail. Don't know if this is a problem with that bridge in general or if it's a QC issue, but yeah...

To conclude, if it wasn't for the problematic bridge, I would certainly say that this has to be the perfect guitar to get. If you're on the verge of buying this guitar, definitely go for it (while you still can, as it is limited edition, until the end of the year I believe).

Pros:

- nice "exotic" firemist finish

- very comfortable to play and beautiful roasted maple neck

- very solid sound, awesome hot rail humbucker

- locking tuners

- very good price point (Harley Bentons are known for it, but this is outrageously good)

Cons:

- bad tuning stability - garbage tremolo system

- annoying (double) protective foil

- waiting times for the 25th anniversary models