HT5RH hiding natural guitar tone??

[NegroStar1]

I've been looking forward to getting an HT5RH for a while and have been reading and hearing really good things about the amp. I really needed a smaller and less powerful amp for practicing at home but not just a small cube spitting out sound. I liked the features such as emulated out since I record in my home studio and even the MP3 plug in to jam along with some songs for some easy backing track play! I finally picked one up new and took it home. I started with the emulated out to my apogee duet into logicX and guitar rig and some others then output to monitors and at other times to my cab and it sounded pretty good. I was able to dial in some of my sounds but it just wasn't quite there yet. The next day when family was gone I hooked up to my Mesa 2x12 lone star cab that has 2 g12t-75's and cranked it!! I started with the clean and dialed around for a bit then added some chorus and o few other combinations in effects loop and couldn't get a good quality sound. Instead it sounded contrived and fake sounding and did not reflect what I know my guitar can produce. I play a les Paul custom flame top with suhr Aldrich (A5) pickups. I normally play on my Marshall jcm900 dual reverb and my Mesa dual rec, and I can easily get the sound in my head and definitely the sound of "my guitar." Initially dismayed, I switched to the overdrive channel and played with the low gain setting and rolling off the volume knob on guitar to clean it up that way and it sounded better than the clean channel but still not like my guitar. I then went high gain and I was surprised how much gain this little amp could make! I jammed and dialed around a bit and realized, it still doesn't sound like my guitar. I then grabbed my sons fender strat and then my wife's ibanez and all three guitars sounded nearly the same through the amp. Overall I was really disappointed in this and felt while it can make a great sound for a small 5watt amp, it felt very sterile and did not allow each guitar to share its unique and natural tones and its nuances. After 2 days, I ended up returning the amp for a refund. I really really wanted to like the blackstar. I love its look and its styling! Unfortunately it just didn't have it for me tone wise and it really didn't play well with some of my pedals. I generally like my cleans with Marshall and my gain from dual Rect, so I may look into the mini rect or something different. I would normally be fine just using guitar rig and similar but when I travel I'd like something I can throw in the car and bring with me. Has anyone out there had any similar feelings with their blackstar ht5rh? Has anyone tried any other models and had better luck by comparison?