So, maybe you've been wondering for a while how an octave mandolin might differ from a regular mandolin, and you've been seeing these ads on eBay for $100 octave mandolins. Are they any good? Well, I bought one. Here's what I found. The ad claims that the top is solid. I can't tell, as the sound hole is bound. It was made in China. The quality of construction is satisfactory. The neck has no adjustable truss rod, but it's pretty fat, so it should be okay. The neck was straight and the frets satisfactory. They'd even been nicely filed at the ends. The big problem was that the action was terrible. It's no fun to play an octave mandolin when the action is about a quarter inch at the 12th fret. I sanded down the bridge. Note that the top is very slightly arched, so getting a good fit was about as much work as doing it on an archtop. However, I was able to bring the strings down to about an eighth of an inch at the 12th fret, and it now plays quite nicely. The tone isn't incredible, but it's good enough to let you get the octave mandolin feel and sound. (I learned that I far prefer a mandolin, so I guess you can say this was money well spent, given that I could have spent a lot more money figuring this out.) Apart from the action, my biggest gripe is that there are no fret markers, either on the top or on the sides. I'll probably inlay markers on the side--that's pretty easy--as it really does make it harder not to have them. Here's a link to the guy selling most of them: <a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/Octave-Mandolin-walnut-spruce-plays-sounds-great-NEW_W0QQitemZ7353994001QQcategoryZ10179QQ
ssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem" target="_blank">http://cgi.ebay.com/Octave-....iewItem</a>
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