These strings sound wonderful, especially for their first month or two before the metallic zing goes away. After that they're still very good and preferable tone-wise to any other flat I've tried imho. I'm taking away 1 star in the quality category, because of the two sets I've had both had some scratchy spots in the winding and I had one string break at the peg during tuning, which has never happened to me on a bass string before. I also wish EB offered a few more gauges for the 5 string set, a 125-40 set of these would imho be the bomb. But even if they don't, I see myself using these flats exclusively for years to come.