I'm just a hobby guitarist - no gigs, no jams, just me and my backing tracks. I turned to the HT-5 for two reasons: I wanted a tube amp (I don't necessarily need it, mind you) and I wanted one that had a power reduction feature. I also had a small Blackstar Fly3 for practice and I liked the sound. I also don't have a lot of experience with amps - I only had a Fender G-Dec Junior and the small practice amp I mentioned above.
I used it with both my guitars (budget models): a Squier Strat and a Harley Benton Fusion II HH.
What I love about it:
* The OD channel sounds superb. You have great control over your tone with the eq and you can also switch between two voices
* The power reduction feature works like a charm and makes the amp usable at bedroom levels. I find that 0.5W is more than enough
* The emulated output on the phones (I use it like this, mostly) sounds impeccable, especially if you have a decent pair (I have a Beyerdynamic DT-770).
* There are tons of output capabilities - XLR, emulated headphones, USB.
* It comes with a footswitch and you can switch between the channels and the "voices" (two for each channel).
* It has an effects loop. I'm not sure how much this is worth for you bedroom players out there, but if you plug a Looper pedal in the FX loop you can stack clean and crunchy loops, a trick only recently I learned about.
* The reverb is a nice addition and sounds great
What I don't like about it:
* You don't have much control over the clean channel - only a volume and a tone (which is useless, since you usually use the tone knob on your guitar). I guess you can always plug in an EQ pedal and make the channel shine
* It would've been nice to be able to control the gain of the clean channel because it's hard to dial in a crispy clean tone. If you push the volume past half it breaks up. If you are looking for a clean amp move along, there's nothing to see here.
* The USB is a nice idea but has a lower volume than I expected. I'm not sure why this happens, I tried recording with it and the volume was lower than any backing track every time. I had to use an IR loader plugin (which is wrong, they claim that the USB emulates the speaker).
Bottom line: As a hobbyist, do you need this? Probably not, there are cheaper, solid-state amps out there. But do you want this? Hell yeah, a tube amp is tons of fun to play, it responds beautifully to your playing, and you get to actually practice your playing dynamics.
