Harley Benton CST-24 BK

I am intermediate learner, playing along rock and pop tracks at home.
This guitar looks stunningly beautiful and elegant!
It came set up to be usable, but action was high - more like acoustic. Intonation on 12th fret was slightly off.
reasonably stable tuners, nice sounding pick-ups (my instructor uses PaulReedSmith guitar which sounds full, weighty, warm, awesome). CST24 does not sound quite like PR S. but with humbucker and split coil option produces a great variety of tones for all styles of music. (Perhaps needless to say, but This PRSish type guitar will not sound quite like Strat or LP. If you want one of those sounds, go for that type of guitar).
Quality: the guitar seems to be really nicely made and finished, very good looking, without a blemish. All parts feel solid and work well, and it should last and be reliable.
But, It needs a bit of setting up of action to be easier to play. Also, lower action gives fret-buzz and you lose some high notes.
I think that this guitar is a reasonable value for money, usable straight out of the box, but can be much better than price-tag with bit of work.

I bought this together with an SC custom lemon drop. The SC custom is staying with me (great guitar - highly recommended) but this one is going back to Thomann.

First the positives:
- Guitar looks very nice. Body is well done, gloss finish is good, binding is low-key and neatly done.
- It has a push / pull coil split on the tone control! It doesn't say this on the product page but this is a great feature.
- Neck is comfortable, do note it is a wider neck than a LP/ST type guitar, in line with the PRS inspired style.

Now the negatives
- The high E string made a very unpleasant buzzing/ringing noise when played, like a discordant sitar. This happened when playing the open string and fretted, so that appeared to rule out the bridge. It appears to be coming from the saddle. This is the reason I returned it, I could have lived with the other negatives
- The fretboard had quite a lot of gunk on it, looked like something (glue?) had spilled during manufacturing. Could have been sanded/polished out had I chosen to keep the guitar.
- I was not very impressed with the WHHB pickups, I thought they were dull and muddy sounding. The MWCHB in the SC custom are miles ahead for my taste, but this is subjective and you might love them.

Overall this could be a great bargain and I was probably just unlucky. On the positive the return process has been very smooth so far.