Incoming dumb wall of text:
Normally I'm not a fan of small amps at all, BUT...
I tried one of these out in a music store on a whim a while back. It sounded better than I expected, a lot better, so I stopped what I was doing and really put some time into it. I ended up turning it off and leaving, but the amp stayed in my head for a few months. I figured it must have been just a fluke that it sounded that good, so I played another one at another music store not long after that. Same thing. Unexpectedly good sound. So a few more weeks went by, and then I bought one.
This is going to sound strong, but due to all the shit talking I’ve done about small amps on these forms over the last while, I feel like it needs to be said. This amp has completely reversed my opinion on small amps. Not all small amps though, just this one. Actually I like this one so much that I’ll put my reputation on the line to I say it is a ridiculously great sounding amp, no caveats. Not "for its size" or "for its wattage" or anything like that. It's just an exceptional sounding amp. I'm over the moon about mine.
For context, in addition to the Mark V25, in my studio there are also nine 100 watt tube heads from Mesa, Bogner, EVH, Peavey, Marshall, and three tube heads between 40-60 watts from Mesa and VHT, and I've been sitting in there flipping around amps with a KHE switcher and directly A/Bing this amp with them through the same cab/mic setup. I'm not just playing this thing in some room somewhere with no references or context and saying it's great. It holds its own with the big boys. Not in volume, obviously, but put it through a good 4x12 and in front of a microphone, and it's unbelievable.
This thing is also actually truly versatile, meaning not only does it do a lot, but it does a lot very well. I even found an extra sort of Easter Egg sound where if you go to the Fat mode and max out the TMB and Master dials, then set the GEQ flat and bump up the 80 Hz slider, and use the Gain control as your volume, you've got an AC30, thanks to those EL84’s. And it's not just some bastardized wannabe kinda-sorta AC30 either. It can sound like a real, actual Vox AC30 if you dial it up correctly. You can even mess around with lowering the Bass and Mid knobs to simulate a treble boost, which is especially cool considering that was probably not something considered by the designer at all.
What I’m saying is that the range of sounds in this thing is insane. WAY more than the stragithforward "6 modes split into 2 channels" as described in the amp's marketing blurb.
So from now on, where I used to say "I don't like small amps" and leave it at that, I'm going to have to type out "I don't like small amps except for the Mark V25" which is annoying. So thanks a lot for that, Mark V25.
Congrats,
@cobrahead1030 it’s a great amp.
Congrats on the new setup! You'll love it. I have the V 35 and the amp can do a lot of things well, it just takes some time messing around with it. I like all the modes, but my favorite is the crunch on channel one. I wish they could make that into a separate channel from the clean.
Same. I was floored when I really dug into the Crunch mode. If you setup that channel like you would a normal high gain Mark tone and then bump the master to get just a bit of poweramp overdrive layered on top of that, the amp starts to breath and flex, and it really comes alive.
That’s another great thing about this amp, actually. For some reason I always get just a little bit nervous about really cranking up and blasting the 100w amps, but I don’t even think twice about cranking this one to get whatever blend of preamp / poweramp distortion I feel like. It just feels like there’s no real consequences to something going wrong when you crank an amp with a 25 watt power section that uses two tubes just barely larger than 12AX7's themselves as opposed to cranking a 100 watter, so you feel free to use the full range of every control in the amp.
