Mark Five:25 : Incredible head

I bought this mainly as a head to play and record metal at home and it does those jobs brilliantly. Note that this head is louder than you think (ex: if your master volume goes over 25% then your neighborhood will hear you!), so if you are concerned about being able to gig with this, then don't be.

Also, due to the Cab Clone functionality you can record without sending the signal in the cabinet, which is awesome for the times when you want to crank up your master volume to get tone out of it, avoiding any disputes with people who 'don't like it loud'.

More, I own the head 3 days now, however I could not dial in a crushing rhythm metal tone. Still working on that, I've learned that it takes time to learn how to dial tone in a Mesa. The manual is very useful for that as it explains what it know does and what each mode is - I could not see myself figuring out everything without reading the manual. This being said, don't get intimidated: the tone exploration is a fantastic experience and everything you dial sounds good (one way or another), so you can't really go wrong. I also just ordered a Maxon 808 pedal to help with that metal sound.

To sum up, I can say that I am satisfied with my purchase and I would for sure recommend the Mark V 25 as a good sounding, versatile and with a small footprint head.