Harley Benton Victory Active SBK 3-stars Reviews

Bought it as a project guitar

I knew about the problems when I bought it. I can't say the humming problem was an easy fix, but polishing the screw on the bridge did the trick (it was pretty hard to remove the paint, but after that everything was fixed).

After that, I observed that the battery was discharging in fewer than a month (the cable wasn't plugged in), so I have disassembled the output jack to find out the DISASTER: only two cables were present, no grounding. The black cable from the battery was directly connected to the sleeve of the jack, no wonder that the battery was discharging. Also, no ground is present on the guitar.

For a learning (to solder and repair guitars) is a good guitar, if you set it up correctly it sounds great. If you buy it, you will have some work until you make it "perfect". Good that I haven't found problems with the frets.

Good starting platform

I have not experienced the grounding issue that has been discussed on this guitar.

The body and finish is without issues. Tuners are so-so.. Usable, but with very bad feel, gear ratio is not 18:1 like fancy groves, but more like 10:1.

Guitar needed set up, few twists for truss rod, and strings were high.

Biggest issue is fretwork. Fret ends are fine, but whole fretboard needs a lot of polishing of frets, as there is lots of oxidation. Stock strings are trash, and were corroded, but this is to be expected. However, this is all manageable and part of basic setup.

Nonetheless, there is fret buzz on few frets (with normal string height of 1.5mm for high e, and 2mm for low e string measured from 12th fret to the bottom of a string, so nothing crazy low) - with this setup, high strings are choking during bends on few of the higher frets - this means that guitar needs fret leveling badly. If you gonna do it yourself, consider half of the guitar price for basic tools.

Pickups are OK, but I did not find big difference between bridge and neck in terms of sound - I prefer more rounded and thicker sound for the neck pickup. But works for metal I guess.

However you would not find flying v guitar in this price, and I have experienced much much worse for a five times more money.

Noise generator

Oh boy is this a noise generator.

Whoever was clever enough to paint the tail piece with the black paint which effectively serves as insulator (so grounding is ineffective) should be fired all together with the whole QC team since NOBODY catched it.

Few minutes with sandpaper did the trick (I have removed the paint from the screw and tail piece on the not so visible place) and now the noise is tolerable.

Anyway, for the price it's really good instrument (if I ignore the noise issue).

The fret ends were finished quite good, no hand cutting so far.

Fretboard is quite dry so conditioning was needed.

To everyone who is considering this guitar:

Buy only if you are looking for project guitar to upgrade...This is not "open and play" instrument...not with the grounding issues.