Peavey Reactor AX Review

Subject: Peavey Reactor AX: REVIEW
Guitar: Peavey Reactor AX (Blonde)
Price Paid: $375 without case

-First Impressions-
The Reactor AX series from Peavey are some stunning looking guitars. Mine is
"semi-transparent" blonde with a brown shell pickguard. This guitar is also
available in Sunburst w/ brown pickguard and solid colors w/ pearloid
pickguard. The blonde and sunburst models have a solid ash body and the solid
colors are made of alder. The neck is maple with a rosewood fretboard and the
body is Tele-Style with two "DB2" pickups - Peavey's humbucking Dual-Blade
pickup. The hardware is chrome and the guitar uses sealed tuners which look
identical to the ones on the Fender American Standard Tele. (Probably made in
the same factory)

-Pickups / Sound-
Overall, the pickups sound pretty nice. Be forewarned, however, that they are
VERY hot. These pickups don't produce any noticable noise. The bridge pickup
is a classic hot Tele sound and the neck pickup is darker sounding. These
pickups are so hot that they almost sound active. My only gripe about these
pickups is that they lack "character". The sound is decent but not fantastic.

-Controls-
This guitar falls short in the controls area. The 3-way toggle switch is VERY
cheap and puts out static while switching pickups. The Volume and Tone
controls are misaligned and don't turn evenly. They rotate like a severely
warped record. This doesn't seem to hinder the functionality of the knobs,
however.

-Feel/Materials-
This guitar uses very high quality wood for the body, neck, and fingerboard.
Further, the guitar plays nice, doesn't buzz and has incredibly fast action.
However, this wasn't the case when I first bought the guitar. The action was
way too high from the factory and the guitar was horribly set up. My guitar
tech worked with the guitar for quite a while to make it play as good as it
does now.

-Quality-
In my opinion, Peavey really falls short in the quality area. Why? About a
year after I bought it, the guitar started making a "popping" noise. This was
immediately identified as a grounding problem. When I pulled the bridge off,
I realized that the ground wire was NOT soldered to the bridge!!! Peavey had
simply placed a little piece of masking tape over the grounding wire and it
had come loose. Folks, there is NO EXCUSE for using masking tape in the
final construction of a guitar. This is VERY bad Q.C. I am extremely
disappointed in Peavey after discovering this flaw. Also, there is no excuse
for the cheap toggle switch or mis-aligned control knobs. Another gripe I
have is that the neck is set too far from the neck joint - in other words,
you can stick a quarter between the neck joint and the neck.

-Overall-
This guitar wasn't "that" expensive to begin with. Therefore, I can overlook
some things that would be unacceptable in higher-priced guitars. However,
this scares me about Peavey's quality lately. This is SUPPOSED to be Peavey's
top of the line Tele-Copy. Knowing what I know about guitars now, I would
have NEVER bought this guitar. Why? I've seen cheaper Tele-copy's that were
built better.

Thumbs down, Peavey!