The action is perfect, the neck is fast, the finish is flawless, the price is good.
Carvin pickups stink. Carvin kinda rapes you on the options, I wanted this guitar to have a Floyd, but they charge you $120 extra for it, and then charge you an extra $30 to get the locking nut... They even sell it in their parts section as 2 separate parts, but charge more for the Floyd than anyone else who sells it as one part (the way it's supposed to be sold!), and they also use an inferior Wilkinson tremolo, had that on my Bolt and it always went out of tune, so out of principle I went with the tune o matic... I wanted the stop tailpiece, but they don't offer the stop tailpiece on the CT models, only the CS... Asinine... So had to go with string through the body. An issue I had was this annoying rattling. Imagine playing a guitar with a locking nut, but had the clamps loose, and they rattle, THAT is the same noise this guitar made , and I also had the same issue with the Carvin Bolt. This rattling caused me to sell both Carvin's, and probably won't buy another ever, and it's sad, because otherwise the guitars were great, they just annoyed the hell out of me with the rattling, and Carvin had no answers for the rattling, neither did the 2 different guitar shops that looked at them.
Carvin makes nice guitars, there are people on the forum that love them, and the Carvin forum is like a cult, none of these people must be having the issues I had, the typical knock on Carvin is over the pickups and customer service. I won't buy a guitar from them again, for various reasons... The Floyd issue, the rattling issue, the fact that Carvin does not like criticism or suggestions... Don't ever suggest Carvin should replace the locking tuners with a locking nut, and not charge the customer for the nut if they don't want the locking tuners, I was told not to tell them how to run their business... I think they have a contract with Sperzel, because they push the hell out of them tuners, and make guitars in a way that makes no sense. I'll give this guitar a 3/5... It felt great in the hands, and once I put Duncan's in it sounded better, and the finish is beautiful, the overall setup was great, but the fret rattling, which had nothing to do with setup, and their attitude kills them. Note: this is an edit, I made the initial reviews a day after getting the guitar, and was definitely in the honeymoon phase, you tend to focus on the positive and ignore the negative the first week or so.