Fender Stratocaster vs Chinese Strat Copy ("Rocktile") - Are Cheap Guitars Any Good?

Sound comparison starts at 5:06 ***DON'T MISS ROUND TWO! http://youtu.be/qs2JeHkWmPw
Fender USA vs. SX Strat - A WORLD of difference from the Rocktile copy! http://amzn.to/1MNTl6d

Online ads track your activity, and after I bought my Fender Strat in Seafoam Green (on Ebay) a knockoff company plastered me with banner ads for their look-alike. Well, then, why not just buy it and compare? If it's just as good, I'll sell the Fender. I just want a 'strat', any make will do. But it must be solidly built - I don't want jacks falling apart, neck coming loose, fret buzz, microphonic pickups etc.
Will the cheapo work? Sure! And haters gonna hate - this is YouTube - but every player should know what their minimum quality standards are and if all signs point to "shoddy" then go with a better built instrument. Period.

A lot of comments are coming in regarding the pickups/tone of the inexpensive guitar. Even if you like a bright guitar tone (or would just swap 500k pots for 250k etc.), this guitar falls short everywhere else.
The misaligned bridge was fixable with the saddles on this one, but I would NEVER recommend someone order one of these, since if it were any further off and it would fall outside the range of intonation adjustment, and be useful only as deco.

Incidentally, I had also ordered a Music Man "copy" from Rocktile at the same time, and it was unplayable. Several frets were literally sanded down to nothing, and the overall build quality was so poor that I sent it back straight away. It was simply unusable, and what makes me angry is that if a beginner got that guitar, he/she might think the problem was on them and be discouraged from learning!

In my opinion, the "bright" sound of the knockoff is not terrible, but the richer mids of the Fender has the kind of "body" that I am looking for in a guitar sound. If I want more treble, I'll just goose the amp treble knob and/or use EQ when recording. Treble and Bass were set at 12:00 on the amp - the "copy Strat" was unbearably bright in front of the amp, and the signal chain (described below) "warmed up" the tone significantly.

This is a fairly in-depth review, and I made a point of recording both guitars properly - A Fender 65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue amp, mic'ed with a Shure 57, through a Neve Preamp, into Pro Tools, and processed with the Massey CT5 compressor. Both guitars were tracked through the same signal chain.

Видео Fender Stratocaster vs Chinese Strat Copy ("Rocktile") - Are Cheap Guitars Any Good? канала JoeDocMusic