rosewood is the exact example I was looking for, because the harley benton fifth horsemen posted has a rosewood fingerboard, and the fact of that Harley benton is that is an EXACT (I mean 100%) copy of my Strinberg Clb-25 (or the other way around, that's not the point), except for the fretless thing. It even has that "active bass control" thingy that comes with the strinbergs. My fretted strinberg clb-25 is rosewood and so is this fretless harley benton (exactly like mine).
Personally I've seen big brand clones a million times like we all have, but I've never seen such an exact spec-by-spec copy, is this normal and I was living in a cave? and which is the copy of which? I had never heard of the brand harley benton before
Haha, funny stuff!
Well I'm pretty sure it's not a spec-by-spec copy... it's the same bass, just with a different brand logo (btw, Harley Benton of course has the fretted version of that bass as well).
I think it works like this: Cheap factory in china produces cheap stuff in mass quantities with requested labels, several importers/dealers buy that stuff with their own label on it and sell as their brand.
Just like the Samick factory in Korea produces much more than only Samick guitars.
Another example: on german ebay you can find lots of basses of the brand HK, which is basically a student funding his studies by importing that stuff and selling it on ebay.
Harley Benton is like the house brand of Thomann, they have all kinds of cheap gear, guitars, cabinets, whatever, probably flutes too. I don't know if it's even sold anywhere else under that name.
To the topic of rosewood vs. ebony: I specifically ordered ebony on my custom Sandberg because I want to use roundwound strings. I want my tone to be as bright and snappy as possible despite it being fretless (for which ebony is better than the warmer sounding rosewood), and I don't want my fretboard to be eaten up after two years of playing.
I could already clearly see the grooves of the stringwire on my Harley Benton after one day of playing, I'm curious to how it will look in two months.
