[Steve DeRosa]

Originally Posted by Martin Maniac

I received the Bugera V5 today...It's a nice little amp but doesn't have the same tone as the V22, until I added a MXR 10 band EQ pedal, then it sounded much better. Still not as good as the V22 but useable. It appears to have the same Reverb as the V22. I tried plugging it into the 12" extension cabinet, that helped.

As far as playing goes, my choice would be the V22. It just sounds better.

A few points:

• As a rule I find class-A triode amps tend to sound "mellower," softer and with less impact than a pentode amp - as I said above, think early-50's small Fender tweed combo or pre-Top Boost Vox - and IME they generally favor brighter-sounding pickups; try a Tele, Strat, or similar guitar (I get my best results from my '82 Yamaha SSC-500, '16 Gretsch 5622T-CB - with its crisper-sounding Super Hi-Lo'trons - P-90 LP Tribute goldtop, and '86 Fender/Squier Strat, in that order) - you might achieve a better balance...
• A low-power 8" speaker in a small box isn't going to have the sonic "bloom," smoothness, freedom from breakup, or extended range of an 80-watt 12" in the oversize V22 cab - which you already discovered; BTW, Bugera used to claim that the first-run "blue-light" versions could drive a 4x12" - see if you can borrow one and test yours...
• Corollary to points #1 and #2: while I don't recall the exact nuts-&-bolts of the psychoacoustic theory involved, it's common for most people to perceive a "louder" sound source (acoustic or electric) as having "better" tone - there's no question whatsoever that the V22 has more absolute power, headroom, and dynamic/frequency range, and as such would also be my go-to for larger venues and/or cleaner tone; that said, I use the V5 almost exclusively for weekly band rehearsals as well as smaller/more "live" (lots of hard surfaces) rooms - in fact I backed up a singer at a local microbrewery show last night (concrete floor, bare brick walls, high ceiling) with the P-90 LP, and had no issues with either tone or volume - which leads me to:
• I don't have a schematic so I don't know the (single) tone control values/parameters, but I can tell you that, unlike the V22 with its 3-band+Presence EQ, this is not even remotely a plug-&-play amp; be advised that the entire main signal path (gain/tone/master) is highly interactive - changing the tone setting will affect the gain structure and vice versa - so while you can shed the outboard EQ, IME you'll need to experiment more than a bit to find the best combinations for you and your instrument(s)...

Hope this helps...