Review of the Harley Benton Custom Line CLD-1048SCE NS Acoustic guitar. Where to buy it?

I’m a guitarist who makes my own recordings in my home studio. I mostly play a 6 string electric guitar, and occasionally, I use an acoustic when recording a backing track. I bought this guitar because of the wide nut, it gives me the ability to play clean chords at last after approximately 55 years of playing. This is one of the very few affordable options at a reasonable price.

The guitar was really well packaged, double boxed and air filled plastic pockets around to keep inner box to lessen the possibility of transit damage. Delivery time was quick from Germany to my door in England, I ordered on Monday and received on Friday.

I was pleasantly surprised with playability of this guitar, intonation and string height (action) were correct. I did drill into the curved underside of the neck heel and fitted a strap button, as I’ve always felt uncomfortable playing with a strap that attaches close to the tuners. A factory fitted strap button would have been very welcome there. I would also have preferred a factory fitted scratch plate, but they are readily available and easy to fit.

The build quality and choice of woods is good for a guitar of this price, although the fret ends would have benefited from some polishing. They are not too harsh, but lack the nice smooth feel of some of the more expensive guitars.

The acoustic sound was very nice, bass notes and high notes cut through nicely. For the electrics, I played through an Art Studio V3 to my PC with a Presonus Audiobox 18/18 interface to Senheiser HD380 headphones. The on board Fishman system does alright, it’s a budget system and performs well enough. An extensive range of highs and lows are available through the bass and treble knobs, and can be adjusted from very muddy through to very shrill with a decent range of acceptable sounds in between. I found that I must remember to turn off the on board tuner, as it does not switch itself off, as I discovered when I noticed we had a new green light in our room around 6 hours after using the guitar.

Summary:
The acoustic sound is super, the electric sound is of reasonable standard, the action and general playability is good. I think this guitar represents excellent value for money and I would recommend it to anyone, particularly those with thicker than average fingers.
Chris.

My background:
I’m playing guitar for almost a year and you could rate me as advanced beginner 😊
My reference guitars are:
– a western: Dean, type PE-CBK. Still being sold for about 400 dollars
– a very, very, very cheap classical (nylon) guitar
– an electric: Harley Benton, typeSC-400 SBK

During practicing I noticed that I did prefer playing the classical guitar above the western guitar. The reason for me is that the classical guitar has a wider nut and has more space between the strings for finger picking. For some, for me unknown, reason most of the western guitars have a nut width of only 42mm while many would benefit of slightly more space in here. As being very happy with the quality of my electric Harley Benton the CLD-1048SCE could be an excellent replacement for my Dean and classical guitar

Details:
It’s really hard to believe the quality of this guitar. I did go through all the details and it is flawless on every single spot. Things that were mentioned in earlier reviews (e.g. uncomfortable tuners) are perfectly fine so I expect that the people from the Thomann company do really act upon the feedback received in these reviews. With respect to the sound I’m just blast away on how good this guitar really is: it is in a complete different league than my old Dean western guitar. The sound is very lively and bright on all frequencies and asks to be played forever.
For those interested: I did measure the width between the e-E strings. Compared with my 42mm (nut) electric and 42 mm Dean the CLD-1048 is about 5mm wider between the strings. So you gain about 1 mm between every string both at the nut and at the bridge end. For me this makes it much more comfortable to play but I would expect that more experienced players could still benefit as well.

Thanks Thomann for providing these great guitars.