Ash body, styled and contoured for hours of comfortable play
Dual, deep cutaways allow access to the entire 24 fret neck
Hard maple neck with adjustable truss rod
Rosewood fretboard with jumbo frets
Die cast tuners
The Douglas WOB 826 is a fretless six-string bass available from Rondo Music that sports many interesting features usually not available on basses at this price point.
All together, you get a rather impressive list of features for a bass for a lot less than pretty much any other fretless 6-string bass with active pickups out there.
I play bass as both a solo artist playing progressive metal and instrumental rock, as well as in a concert band ensemble playing classical, jazz, and marching band music. I'm playing this bass through a variety of amps including my own little Fender Rumble 15 practice amp, and larger Fender and Orange bass amps during rehearsals.
The bass' pickups are rather clean sounding, something which surprised me as this was my first experience with active pickups on a bass, and provide a very punchy tone that also surprised me as my last fretless bass, a Yamaha BBN4F, had a very flat and dull sound compared to this. The bass and treble controls are rather fun to play around with as well, and I've had some very interesting tones as a result of playing around with them. I've taken to rolling the treble control to half (the controls have a handy notch to let you know when you're at the halfway point!), which decreases a bit of the treble-y "attack," which makes it rather perfect for use in the concert band setting, where you want a sound rather closer to that of a double bass.
Really, for the money, you can't go wrong with this tone.
I haven't owned the bass quite long enough yet (just over a month as of this writing) to judge its long-term reliability, but I've used this at several rehearsals with my concert band, and so far it seems to have held up quite nicely. The hardware on it seems rock-solid for the most part, though that will remain to be seen as I use this bass more and more. You will have to invest quite heavily in 9V batteries to feed the active electronics, though if you're thrifty, rechargeables are easy to find, or you could do like me and simply purchase them from a dollar store. I have opened up the electronics cavity and it looks like all of the electronics are soldered together rather well, and properly shielded as well.
While I would not do a rock gig (concert band gigs are not exactly known for their tendency to lead to extreme instrument abuse...) without a backup on ANY instrument regardless of price, I do feel that if I did not have one for some reason, I would not sweat it too much, since this is a pretty solid instrument. The strap buttons seem pretty solid, the finish seems pretty solid, and the components seem pretty solidly in place.
So overall, this is a great bass for the price. While there may be comparable products from other low-price manufacturers like Harley Benton and such, I'm pleased that I went with Rondo Music for this one, as I ended up with a very pleasing bass to play. And when you consider that the quality on this is rather decent (I'd say it's VERY comparable to my Ibanez RG8 in quality, which was about twice the price in USD when I bought mine), it really begins to show itself as a total steal!
All I can truly say is that you're probably not going to come across a better deal than this.
Travis