The Internet Has Thoughts About Premier Guitar's EarthQuaker Towers Review.
Premier Guitar said no one does reverb like EQD. The forum already owned one.
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
“No one does reverb like EarthQuaker Devices. Towers is something else entirely.”
What the internet actually said
“I know there's not much love for EQD here but I don't care they are the GOAT for me.”
“I don't say this lightly but this box contains a similar amount of 'magic' as the dispatch master.”
“Loving LFO mode the most right now but all three modes are very distinct and different from each other.”
The Suede Read
Premier Guitar ran a review of the EarthQuaker Devices Towers and declared it something else entirely. The lead line was a statement: no one does reverb like EarthQuaker Devices. EQD has spent two decades earning that sentence.
Here is what the review could not know. Over at The Gear Forum, someone had already bought two. The opener made it plain: they knew EQD does not have the most fans on that forum. They did not care. They called EQD the GOAT and moved on to what the pedal actually does.
What it does, according to people who paid $299 and took it home, is something adjacent to magic. One poster compared it directly to the Dispatch Master — the kind of sentence you do not write lightly about any new release. Another got into the modes: Manual, Envelope, LFO. All three distinct. All three usable. The LFO mode got the most attention, which tracks — if you are paying $299 for a reverb that filters and modulates in stereo, the LFO mode is why.
Premier Guitar described a pedal warmer and more musical than EQD's other ambient experiments. The forum described a pedal that earns the comparison to a classic. Both are right. The difference is the forum had already plugged it in.
That gap — between what gets printed before the boxes ship and what gets said after — is exactly what we are here to close.
Spotted something the press fluffed? info@suedeai.org
An enthusiast who already owned two agreeing with a rave is the weakest receipt in the column's drawer, and no one does reverb like EQD is a sentence about branding that several EQD competitors falsify on this masthead's own best lists.
The confirmation offered here is a forum poster who bought two Towers before the review landed, opens by acknowledging his brand loyalty is unfashionable, calls the company the GOAT, and proceeds to enjoy his purchase. That is the single most predictable document in gear discourse: the early-adopting superfan liking the thing he pre-committed to. The column's own methodology pages teach that this exact receipt, the honeymoon rave from a self-selected believer, is noise. When noise agrees with the press, apparently it graduates to signal.
The review's lead sentence, no one does reverb like EarthQuaker Devices, is the kind of claim the receipts desk exists to torture, and it got a pass because it flatters a beloved builder. This magazine's own reverb coverage crowns Strymon halls, Chase Bliss rooms, Walrus's Fathom, and EQD's own Avalanche Run across various best columns. Several people do reverb like EQD, some of them at EQD. The sentence is true only as a statement about brand aesthetic, hand-drawn art and characterful weirdness, which is to say it is ad copy with a good ear, and the column reprinted it as a verdict.
Here is the audit that was available: Towers against the Afterneath it descends from, against a Fathom at street price, level-matched, with the receipts from month-three owners on whether the novel features survive the honeymoon. Nobody ran it, upstairs or down. Press was right is a conclusion this desk is entitled to reach about EQD, a company whose consistency this masthead documents at length. It is not entitled to reach it on one superfan and a slogan, and the shortcut is the story.