The Internet Has Thoughts About Two Magazines Wiring the Eastman Offset Differently.
Both gave it 4.5 out of 5. MusicRadar counted a master volume and two tones. Premier Guitar described zeroing either of the volume controls. Same $999 guitar.
Two sides. One page.
Johnny argues the piece. Then he argues against himself. Somebody has to check his work. Read both, then call the winner below.
The take is shown below.
Source
“There's an almost played-in vintage feel to this new Offset that's appealing: it doesn't feel like a glossy new guitar”
What the other mastheads said
Premier Guitar · 4.5/5 · Jul 21, 2026
“In the combined pickup setting, if you zero either of the volume controls you mute the whole instrument rather than a single pickup.”
The Suede Read
Two magazines gave the $999 Eastman FullerTone Offset '62 the same score, 4.5 out of 5, two months apart. They do not agree on how many volume knobs it has.
MusicRadar, in May, states it twice — once in the body and once in the specs block: we get the same three controls, master volume and a tone for each pickup, with their amp-style white plastic knobs. One volume, two tones. Its only listed drawback is that big necks might not be to everyone's taste.
Premier Guitar, in July, describes a guitar that cannot be wired that way. In the combined pickup setting, it reports, zeroing either of the volume controls mutes the whole instrument rather than a single pickup. Either of the volume controls. That is a sentence about a guitar with two of them, and it is describing a specific behaviour the reviewer clearly encountered.
One of those accounts is wrong and we cannot tell you which. We could not locate Eastman's own spec page for this model, and there are no owner reviews yet — not Sweetwater, not Reverb, not Thomann — so there is no third party to break the tie. That is the whole finding.
Both reviewers liked the guitar and both are probably right about that: light, well balanced, a genuinely good neck, cheap for what it is. But one of these reviews has the knobs wrong, readers cannot tell which, and nobody printed a correction.
Spotted something the press fluffed? info@suedeai.org
A knob count is not a verdict. Both magazines judged the guitar correctly, and the column has found a copy error and dressed it up as an indictment.
Take the finding at its highest and it is this: one of two spec descriptions is inaccurate. That is a fact-checking slip, the kind every publication on earth commits, and it is worth an email to the editor rather than a verdict on a scoreboard. Nothing about it touches what either review actually claimed — that a $999 import feels broken-in rather than glossy, that the neck is excellent, that the thing is light and well made and cheap for the class. The column concedes all of that in its second-to-last paragraph and scores it split anyway.
And notice which outlet is being penalised. Premier Guitar's line is not a spec sheet at all; it is a report of hands-on behaviour, describing what happened when the reviewer turned a knob down in the combined setting. That is exactly the sort of detail this column claims never gets printed — a small practical annoyance nobody in marketing would volunteer. Filing it under press failure because a rival's spec table disagrees punishes the more useful review.
The honest reading is that the column ran out of evidence and kept the verdict. It could not reach Eastman's own documentation, could not find a single owner, and could not determine which description is correct — its own words. In that position the available move is to publish the discrepancy and score nothing, which the format allows. Choosing split instead means the scoreboard now records a hit against the guitar press on the strength of a question the post explicitly says it cannot answer.