The Internet Has Thoughts About Two Magazines Grading the Same AI Amp.
MusicRadar filed the AI under cons and scored it 3.5. Three days later Guitar.com filed the same feature under pros and scored it 8/10.
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
“The app is where things get both wild and a little weird”
What the other mastheads said
Guitar.com · 8/10 · Jun 5, 2026
“AI features are fun and can open up new creative possibilities”
The Suede Read
Positive Grid built an amp around an AI assistant, and two magazines reviewed it three days apart. They agree the hardware sounds good. They do not agree on whether the thing the amp is named for is an asset.
MusicRadar went first, on 2 June, and gave it 3.5 out of 5. The headline is the verdict: the app is where things get both wild and a little weird. Its cons ran four deep — the app isn't the most intuitive, the software doesn't always nail the tones you're asking for, the footswitch is sold separately, and, memorably, horrible AI art within the app is an eyesore.
Guitar.com published on 5 June and gave it 8 out of 10. Its cons name the same defect, that AI features can be inconsistent and feel gimmicky at times. But its pros list carries a line MusicRadar would never have written: AI features are fun and can open up new creative possibilities. Same software, same week, filed under opposite headings.
Neither review is a rave and neither is dishonest. Both flag the inconsistency. The gap is what they conclude from it — one treats a half-working assistant as a hurdle, the other as a bonus.
Anyone reading one and then the other learns that the amp's defining feature is either a creative tool or an obstacle. We found no owner reviews to break the tie.
Spotted something the press fluffed? info@suedeai.org
Two reviewers weighed a genuinely novel feature differently and both showed their working. That is not a failure of the press, it is the press functioning.
The column keeps looking for contradictions and keeps finding disagreements, which are not the same animal. Nobody misreported a fact here. Both reviews say the AI is inconsistent; both say the amp sounds good; both name the trade in plain language. What differs is the weighting, and weighting is the part of a review that cannot be outsourced — it is a judgement about who the thing is for, made by a named writer who has to sign it.
That the weightings diverge on this particular feature is the least surprising outcome available. An AI assistant bolted to a practice amp is new, nobody has a settled convention for scoring it, and a reasonable critic can look at a half-working novelty and call it either a hurdle or a bonus depending on whether they think a beginner will enjoy poking at it. Guitar.com's own headline asks whether the amp needs an AI chatbot at all. That is not a masthead hiding its reservations.
And a three-and-a-half against an eight is a narrower gap than the post's framing implies: seventy per cent against eighty, on a product both outlets recommend with caveats. The column has taken a ten-point spread between two honest write-ups and filed it beside entries where a magazine printed a joke in a cons box. If split means anything, it should not mean two critics disagreeing in public about a brand-new category, with their reasoning laid out for anyone to check.