Cabclone problems

I just received my 8 Ohm Cabclone and I have to say classifying it as disastrous experience would be an understatement.
Plugged in my Mark V head then into recording interface, I can't dial a half decent sound. The amp seems to have no headroom whatsoever, the cleans are always "scratchy". Just horrible.
Tried in headphones mode, same results.
Got into a PA: same junk.

It is so bad that it would lead to make me believe it is a faulty unit. However I am not the only one having these kind of problems. A quick tour of other guitar forums shows that. Not to mention the Andertons youtube review that was pulled out (why couldn't just they try another unit if MESA told them the one they tried was defective???? They are Andertons Music for crying out loud!).

And yet there are a number of people that seem to like it. I refuse to believe they would like my unit, so there must be something going on.
Operator error maybe? Is there anyone who could share how they made it a successful experience?

I just want to add that I feel deeply insulted by how John at the hollywood store dealt with me when I called back trying to explain that my unit might be defective.
I was not given any chance to explain what the behavior was, in fact Mr. John said he had "no time because there was another customer on the other line"
He did not even acknowledge the possibility that my unit was faulty and he did not even try to understand why I was trying to tell him that it was the case. "If you don't like it send it back".

Really 360 degrees bad experience. I am really sad to say that this costed MESA a lot.

Bad bad bad stuff. Really.

1 in 1,000,000 customers have a bad experience with Mesa Boogie products.
Thanks for taking that bullet and being that guy for us. :lol:

Bummer it had to cost Mesa so much though. :roll:

I always had good experience with Mesa Boogie. This was with their Hollywood store, just to be clear.
Ryjan, I am a fanboy just as you are. I own a mark V as well as a 5:25 and I had single recto that I loved too. So I was shocked.

I frankly do not appreciate sarcasm if that is what you intended, as I believe it is in the interest of everyone to know if there is something bad going on as well as to give someone who has an explanation the opportunity to voice it and clarify.

I'm sure you're using decent cables and you tried more than one. That's the only thing I can think of that might cause the problem. If there's nothing wrong with it, then maybe that's just the way it sounds and those that like the cab clone play a different style of music that blends that sound out.

It's a shame you had a bad experience with the guy at the hollywood store. Everybody has bad moments. I know the customer is always right etc, but people are human. If you notice a trend, then I would take my business elsewhere.

I guess it was just a bad employee at the store.
He really upset me.
However after talking to Chris in Petaluma and to Mark at the store, I was at least able to make my point regarding the suspicious behavior of the unit. They were helpful in this regard, as I would have expected.
It seems only fair to me that if they sent me a defective unit, I should send it back and if they find it defective indeed, they should send another one at their expenses (after having refunded also the money I had to spend to ship it back in the first place).

If the unit will turn out not to be defective, then I simply will think that for once Mesa put out a bad product. But that will be my opinion.

Update:

With the help of the Petaluma guys (who were were thorough in following up with my issue, in the tradition of the Mesa boogie support) I was able to get good clean from the ch1 of my mark V through the cabclone and my recording interface .
There are a couple of things that should be better documented, I think.
First of all the level of fx send does affect the sound even though I wasn't running anything in the loop.
Also the signal out of the cabclone is very hot so you need extremely low setting on any downstream gain. When I say extremely low I really mean even lower.

So I decided to give it a shot till band rehearsal in a couple of days, but things look much better. It seems it was operator error after all, and I am glad I am able to correct myself