The Loar LM-110 Honey Creek SBB

Good tone for the price

I was new to playing the mandolin when I purchased this item, so this review is after having done a lot of practice, and I have played other mandolins in order to compare (including an Eastman oval hole, and a professional luthier hand made instrument).

The tone is really good for an instrument in this price range, although I did swap out the stock strings for some flat-wounds, which worked well for me. This took a little of the brightness off, but it left a lovely rich quality to the tone of mandolin, which has a pleasing solidity and warmth to it, and there was still that typical mandolin "sweetness" to the upper end. As might be expected in this price range, the weakest string is the lowest G string, but otherwise, the tone is pretty even.

The finish is adequate - no major issues, and the matt texture of the finish "probably" contributes to the sound and feel of playing in a good way. I found that I had to very gently file a sharp corner off the "nut" on the e-string side because I kept catching my index finger on it.

The tuning pegs are "ok" - not the easiest to fine tune, but they do hold pitch well.

In terms of out of the box setup, the bridge was really not positioned correctly, so you may need to be ready to do a little re-positioning in order for the upper notes to play in tune. Maybe I was unlucky... but this is easily fixed. The adjustable height on the bridge itself means you can get a half decent setup with little effort.

fair to middling instrument

I've had the instrument for three weeks now. I don't think the mandolin is worth the money, but I'm a child of the 1940's so I think everything is too expensive these days! The strings on it sounded awful, so I replaced them with D'Addario EJ74's. The action was too high, so I've adjusted that, the intonation was ok. It now sounds like a reasonable instrument!