The Internet Has Thoughts About Premier Guitar's EarthQuaker ZEQD-Pre Review.
Premier Guitar scored the Dr. Z collab 4.5 in March. The two owners who reviewed it had already bought it in January, and one of them wrote the warning label the magazine left off.
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
“In direct-to-DAW situations, the ZEQD-Pre is warm, alive, and sounds, well, a lot like a real amp.”
What the internet actually said
The Suede Read
Premier Guitar reviewed the EarthQuaker and Dr. Z ZEQD-Pre in March and scored it 4.5. The pros: it excels in front of a tube amp, a modeler, or a DAW, the EF86 tube adds richness and dynamics, and it solves the problem of having no backline. Direct to DAW, it is warm, alive, and sounds a lot like a real amp. The cons section was one wish: the boost is close to perfect, but you cannot use the EQ at the same time.
Here is the part worth noticing. Both owner reviews on Reverb went up before that review ran, in mid and late January. The buyers got there two months ahead of the magazine, which is ordinary and almost never acknowledged.
They also broadly agree with it. One owner runs it as a dual boost in front of his amps, or at unity with his pedals feeding into it, and says it makes all his fuzz and dirt sound better hitting the amp. He likes it in front of a Princeton. The second tried it into a Dr. Z PHD and then a Fender Champ, reported it sounded huge, then added the line the magazine never quite prints: if you want high gain, this ain't it.
That is not a contradiction. Premier Guitar never claimed high gain. But a $399 pedal whose review lists three pros and one interface wish could stand to say what it is not for, and the customer said it in eight words.
Spotted something the press fluffed? info@suedeai.org
Two five-star reviews is not a jury, and 'the owners posted first' is a fact about retail timing, not a finding about the press.
The post's own headline observation collapses when you look at it. Owner reviews predate the magazine review because the pedal went on sale before the magazine finished testing it, which is how every product launch has ever worked. Presenting that as something the press failed to acknowledge dresses up a shipping calendar as a scandal. Nobody at Premier Guitar claimed to have gotten there first, and no reader thinks a March review means the pedal appeared in March.
On substance the column concedes the whole argument and then charges a fee anyway. It admits Premier Guitar never claimed high gain. It admits the owners agree with the review. It admits the review's one stated reservation was a real interface limitation, honestly disclosed. Having granted all of that, it still faults the piece for not printing a disclaimer about a capability it never advertised. Reviews describe what a thing does. Demanding an exhaustive list of what it doesn't do is a standard that would double the length of every review and inform no one.
And two reviews is two reviews. Both five stars, both from a single retailer's product page, one of them by a man cheerfully narrating his way through two amps in a row. I'm glad they're happy. It is not a sample that can convict or acquit anybody, and a column built on receipts should be the first to say so instead of banking a press-was-right on the strength of a sample size it would mock if a magazine cited it.