Welcome and congratulations on the new amp!
I get what you're saying about the MkV being an unforgiving amp. It can certainly be set up to put the players technique under the microscope. The cool thing is that it can also be set up to be very forgiving as well. I had spent hours demo'ing the MkV before purchasing one this past October and felt then that I had a pretty good grasp on what it's capable of. I have since come to realize that I had barely scratched the surface. I've been discovering new possibilities with the amp since its arrival and I still haven't run into any boundaries.
I don't spend a lot of time tweaking amps, this one included. If I sit down to play I turn the amp on and just play. If I'm turning knobs and flipping switches it's because that's the activity I chose to engage in. This is one of the enjoyable aspects of this amp for me. Once each week or so I'll sit down to play with the amp, to see what else I can find. When I do this I'll usually focus on a single channel and mode and I'll try different settings in the preamp, output, and power sections. In this way the MkV is as much a toy as it is an amp (albeit an expensive toy, though my wife is happy that I play with guitars, basses, and amps instead of cars, boats, and motorcycles - music toys are cheap by comparison
).
As I stated above I generally don't spend time tweaking amps - I'm a set-and-forget kind of guy. Here again the MkV is a joy to use! I have my favorite settings and I have so far found them to work everywhere I've taken the amp. I check the settings at setup, power up the amp, and flip the standby switch when it's time to play. The only setting I have to mess with is the output level to set my volume in the room. The MkV is, IMO, the first plug-n-play Mark series amp. It's also the first Mark series amp that allows for ideal settings for clean, crunch, and lead tones (i.e. separate tone stacks for each channel). The layout is deceptively simple too. Once the control layout for a single channel is committed to memory it would be easy to make changes on the fly even on a dark stage. This on an amp sporting more than 50 user adjustable controls - nice!
What I like most about the MkV is that, to my ears, the amp offers nine unique voicings - three footswitch selectable on the fly - and it makes no compromises in any one of them to facilitate another. Each of these voicings (even Edge) would make for a great sounding amp on its own. This is not often the case with channel switchers.
I could go on and on about the advantages this amp affords - I think I'll stop here. Again - congratulations on the new amp! I hope you dig it as much as I have.
