hey saucygitaristak2,, I own the ROV series 2 combo. Im using it along with recto 2x12 cab so I now have the 3 speakers working together.
The last poster chennie couldnt have spoken the truth about this amp more. I have gone through the exact same ordeals with the ROV as he did.
First like he said,,the addition of the cab is great,but I dont see it totally needed for a good lead tone. It seems to add more depth,bottom end,,a much fuller sound.
I also have noticed with the ROV and pretty much any tube amp that they sure were not made to cover any flaws in your playing. And the 3 guitars I own all sound very much different through it. As they should.
Example,,I once owned a pod xt,,all three guitars sounded pretty much the same way through it. Once I brought home my ROV I couldnt even play one,,fender tele standard, through it because of the cheap *** pickups. In order to get the same output from it compared to my LP Custom I needed to have the volume of the ROV at about 70% compared to the LP at 20%. I never even thought about anything like that with a pod solid state, Everything played the same.
And like chennie said,,it also took me a good month or so to find the sweet spots,,they are there,,I learned a lot from the guys on this forum.
I also agree with the breaking in speaker thing. At least I hope. I purchased my recto 2x12 cab about 2 months after my ROV. For some reason at somewhat high volumes with a good amount of bass I get a farting sound out of the cab? I cant believe the cab cant handle the ROV,,its being run with an amp that maxes out at 70 watts lower than its max wattage,,and it does this when only cranked half way.. Hopefully it simply needs to break in a bit,,,God I hope.
You had also mentioned the use of an overdrive with it,,,get one.
I use 2 different OD;s with it all the time. I use them differently through the ROV but the main use for me is to use it for boosting,,tightening,adding sustain and saturation to my lead work.
Again this took me a while to find the right sounds because I found myself always adding too much gain from the pedal on top of the high gain from the amp. Too much gain made it sound very sloppy.
And one last thing,,I couldnt agree more with chennie again about using less gain. I only use the modern channel now for that severe power chugging metal sound,,and have found myself using the raw channel more and more. I usually keep the gain on the raw channel around 12 and 2 oclock,,,where as the vintage between 10 and 12 oclock.
Good luck to you.
P.S ,, the addition of a graphics EQ and even more so a good reverb pedal in the loop helped a lot also.