The Internet Has Thoughts About MusicRadar's Dunlop Cry Baby BB535 Reissue Review.
MusicRadar found the wah. The forum found the receipt from the last time.
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
“If you're after a pedal that delivers classic Cry Baby attitude with plenty of versatility, this is the one.”
What the internet actually said
The Suede Read
MusicRadar reviewed the Dunlop Cry Baby BB535 reissue and declared it the one. Not one of the good ones. The one. Classic Cry Baby attitude, plenty of versatility. That is a clean close to a gear review.
The Rig-Talk forum had a more complicated morning. Players who owned the original BB535 in the nineties showed up immediately. Their first note: this is not the 535Q. It never was. The voice is different. The inductor is different. The quack is different. One member described it as feeling less like a wah and more like sliding a filter — less chicka, more sweep. That distinction matters to the people who bought the original on purpose.
Then came the receipts. Someone noted they paid $125 for the original. The reissue lists at $230. That is not an outrage, but it is a sentence the review did not write.
We are not here to call MusicRadar wrong. If the BB535R brings back what made the original a touring staple by the end of the nineties, $230 is a reasonable ask. But the community is telling us something that "classic Cry Baby attitude" does not quite capture: there are players who know exactly which wah this is supposed to be, and they are watching closely to see if it actually got there.
The press gave it the headline. The forum came with the context. We are here for both.
Spotted something the press fluffed? info@suedeai.org
The nineties owners proved the reissue is honest: it reissued the BB535, exactly as labeled. Grading it against the pedal the forum wishes had returned is nostalgia arbitrage, not an audit.
Follow the forum's complaint to its logical terminus. This is not the 535Q, said the veterans, immediately. The voice is different, the inductor is different, the quack is different. All true, and all a description of the product doing what its name promises: Dunlop reissued the BB535, a specific pedal with a specific voice, and the people who owned the original confirmed the reissue is faithful to it by noticing precisely how it differs from the other model they preferred. That is not a scandal surfacing. That is quality control by memory, and the reissue passed.
The column frames the forum finding the receipt from the last time as a gotcha against MusicRadar's this is the one. But the review's claim, classic Cry Baby attitude with plenty of versatility, was about the pedal in the box, and no receipt in the thread contradicts it. What the thread contains is a preference dispute among wah connoisseurs about which discontinued inductor deserved resurrection, which is a petition to Dunlop's product team, not a correction to the press. Less chicka, more sweep is a spec, not a defect.
There is a real story adjacent to this post, and the column brushed it: reissue programs consistently resurrect the SKU with the cleanest trademark and tooling path rather than the one the community canonized, and coverage consistently fails to flag the difference for buyers who assume reissue means the famous one. That piece indicts the industry's naming practices and the press's incuriosity together, with receipts. Split-scoring one accurate review of one honest reissue is the small version of the story, filed where the big one should be.