Victory Kraken MKII In-Depth Review 

Thanks man. Yeah it has so many great sounds in it.. Kinda hard to dial in a bad sound honestly. I've been playing the Victory Jack MKII for the last week or so and it's a totally different animal. I haven't sent the Kraken back yet so I'm going to be doing a side by side vid of the two showing how they compare and differ from one another. Both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Yeah the Lynx sounds like it would be right up my alley and is on my list to try. I played a hotcat 30R years ago and it was incredible. I wish Martin would bring the Cornford MK50 back as a new victory amp. Always loved the sound of those and incidentally the only one I’ve played was sitting right next to that Hotcat.

Would you say that the victory kraken can't cover some Splawn territory also?

@@metalmeister3054 Kinda. It's got a lot more flexibility than the nitro but doesn't cut/bite nearly as hard in the upper midrange the way the nitro does. The kraken has a lot better clean channel and a really great range of low gain crunch sounds where as the nitro doing crunch just sounds like a high gain amp sort of being choked back... like it REALLY wants to be a lot meaner and the Kraken does a great low gain crunchy sound and sounds natural doing it. The other big thing between the two is that the nitro is well in excess of 100 watts and you feel every bit of it. If you're using a loadbox and IR loader going DI, you lose a lot of what makes the nitro such a killer amp.

I've never personally plugged into one of the smaller EVH's but I have a friend who has owned quite a few 5150's and he likes the Kraken just as much. Honestly, for me personally, the Kraken gets the nod due to a warmer and smoother crunch channel. It sounds more natural of a low gain crunchy classic rock/blues voice than what the 5150's have (Which to my ears is more of a high gain signal that has had the life choked out of it). I think if I were needing an amp with less focus on cleans or classic rock, I would probably lean to the 5150. Also, don't count out the Bluguitar Iridium. That thing RIPS and it's tiny.

@@FastRedPonyCar Thanks for the reply! Makes sense! I like both a good clean, rock crunch and high gain rhythm so maybe the Kraken would be a good choice :) And….I’ve been playing with the Iridium since it came out :) Really love that amp(apart from the clean not having a high headroom at band volume…it distorts really fast) and cannot wait for the AmpX!!

@@bengirard1984 Yeah I think I sold my iridium too hastily. I had several things I'd spent money on and ended up keeping the Synergy SYN1 and selling the iridium. I want to try the Mercury too. The AmpX is going to be great when it comes out but it sounds like Thomas has been struggling with the high gain sounds from the unit. He'll get there though.

@@FastRedPonyCar Yeah the last interview I've seen from him was about the high gain stuff, true. He will get there, I have faith in him, but I must say that I contemplate more and more the Fractal FM3 (or FM9) or the Synergy stuff (there's a Randall RM100 close to me on sell at a great price that is tempting haha) to be honest at this point in time. It's just that I'm 40 and I'm getting tired of brining heads to gigs haha So I still would prefer a one-in-all solution that would sound great like the AMP X (hopefully) will.

@@bengirard1984 I hear that. I'm 43. The less I have to drag in and tear down at 1am, the better. I did the minimal pedalboard rig for about a year with the FM3 and it was great. Zero complaints. Had the rack mount AxeFX III for a year before that and also great but I didn't use even a fraction of that thing's power which is why I downsized to the FM3 and it was perfect. I got bored (as we always do) and went back to tube amps but instead of dragging a cab to the gigs, I used the captor X for a while going to the PA and to an FRFR behind me, I used my THD Hotplate into an OX Stomp for cab sim (which I liked better than the captor) and lately, I've been taking the OX Box and I feel like it's the best I've tried. The Boss Waza TAE is really powerful but you're limited to 1 IR and even with the best IR's I've got, it still doesn't sound nearly as "right" as the OX Box does. I think that the Iridium/Mercury into the OX Box would be a sort of best of both worlds in terms of still maintaining a lightweight pedalboard rig but still having the OX there for running a world class speaker sim into an FRFR for a much louder stage sound if you need it and a great DI signal to the PA. The thing I really like about using the OX live (which the WAZA box can do also) is have the headphone output going to the FRFR and using the headphone volume knob to control your stage volume totally independent from what goes to the house so the sound guy can still maintain control over that. I don't like relying on a monitor mix coming from the board for my FRFR because I ONLY want guitar signal through it and I don't want any weird or questionable EQ choices the sound guy decides he wants to make to be coming out the FRFR behind me. For what it's worth, the Synergy preamps into the OX Stomp sound good. I did a vid on the Bogner XTC module (the only one I've got right now) and it's great with no power amp but only sounds that much better when I fed it into the fryette powerstation but it wasn't by any means lacking just going straight to the OX stomp.