The Watering Hole

...and it sounds sooo much better.  With the stock Mesa tubes, I wasn't too wild about the clean sound.  It wanted to break up really soon (even with the gain on 9 o'clock it was on the edge of breaking up) and it was a little too spanky, almost ice-picky.  So I did something I wouldn't normally do on a Boogie; I dropped some JJ 12ax7s in it.  In my Roadster, the JJ's sound horrible; they scalp the treble too much and make it sound dull.  But in the Mark V, which has tons of highs, they sound AWESOME!!  The cleans drastically warmed up and suddenly I can turn the gain knob up to 12 o'clock with zero breakup (I luvs a pristine clean).    I can also turn the treble up to a reasonable level (I was turning the treble down to 10 o'clock at most).  Only thing I had to do was re-eq channels 2 and 3. They wanted to make those channels a little muddy.  

I also dropped a set of TAD 6l6s in it.  

The longer I live with this amp, especially after retubing it, the more I luv it.  The Mark IV and IIC+ settings are awesome lead sounds.  They sing more than my Roadster.  Crunch setting gets more into a classic rock setting than anything on the Roadster and does it better.  

That is the one thing that I thought made the Lonestar suck was the tubes. I am sure Randall Smith knows what he is doing electronically and for warantee purposes, but musically the tubes they pick are too cold. Which gives the Mesa amps a hollow metallic sound (and I don't mean a metal genera sound) unless you turn them way up. I use the hottest tubes I can get and then BIAS it down to about 20% hotter than Fender recommends. The tonal difference is astounding.

I personally think standard Mesa tubes just plain suck.   :D  We've had at least 2 or 3 heads where the V1 tube has FAILED out of the box.  From what I've heard on the net, they're just rebranded Sovteks.  ICK!!

My theory with my amp and why I didn't care for the cleans is that one of the tubes wasn't quite right.  Well, that's fixed.  Pre-tube switch did it all.  I swapped the power tubes first and it fixed zero (but did sound better).  

I did drop high-gain tubes in V2 & V3.