Goodness me, isn't it pretty! Yes this is a mandolin and yes it is an Ovation and or course it's an electro acoustic. Taking the same principles that have been applied to the Ovation guitar series, with the round-back composite body (which has something to do with vibrating helicopter blades and a multi-billion dollar arms company), Ovation have created this cheeky number.

Straight out of the box you are immediately struck by the attention to detail that has clearly been taken in the building of this mandolin, the Ovation principles that hammers and glue made from cows just aren't good enough shining through. Starting at the headstock, you immediately realise that it's a mini Ovation guitar headstock with eight open back machineheads. The machineheads have an amazingly smooth action and are clearly made from a good dense metal, sprouting from the macineheads are eight factory fitted D'Adderio coated strings which lay cleanly over the nut and head down the rosewood fretboard.

The fretboard is complimented with 23 highly polished frets and with an action of only 2.5mm at the twelve fret, this mandolin is very forgiving to play. The Spruce top is half obscured by the dark Ruby Red Burst finish, only allowing the wood to shine through about a third of the way into the body. The result of this is a very rich finish and accentuates the leafy Epaulets on the shoulders of the mandolin.

The back of the mandolin is what sets it apart from others. I believe the story behind the composite material goes something like; a couple of cutting edge engineers where designing materials for helicopter blades, when one of them realised (being a guitarist himself) that the adverse effects they were getting from their new materials, the unwanted resonance, would work quite nicely for the body of a guitar. So there you go, high-tech mandolin.

Plugged in, all frequencies are catered for, from the piercing highs that you would expect from a mandolin down to some suprisingly serious lows. These lows have to be attributed to the roundback, as they really are nowhere to be seen in a normal mandolin. Obviously this can be brought back with the OP-24 preamp and can be left in the background as a pleasant warmth, contributing to this mandolins far from standard design and making it a very versatile instrument.

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