Just seeing this now and while I can see the point I also know there are a few guys out there, myself included, that swear by the RK2. Here’s why:
I. All the best of the recto sounds.
IIA. The ability to play fully saturated at bedroom volumes. The RK2 sounds better at bedroom levels than even the Mini Rectifier and Rectoverb 25. It’s not even close. You’d think the lower wattage amps would do this better, but no.
IIB. There is magic to running 6L6s and EL34s at the same time. You can only do this on a handful of amps. The orange channel in Modern especially is insanely rich sounding in this config.
IIC. Tweed mode. The clean modes are the Lonestar cleans but still sound pretty basic. Both clean and fat need a treble boost or compressor circuit up front to sound right. Tweed mode though, my lord it’s so good. Running it in full headroom 120w mode with all the power tubes pushing it is just a sound you have to play.
IIC+. Channel-specific diode modes. The clean channel and vintage mode in the higher gain channels sounds great with tube rectification, while you can set higher gain modes to silicon rectification. Yes you can do this on the MW recto as well, but not on earlier models.
IIC++. Brit mode, very misunderstood, but if you set the amp to spongy mode instead of bold, use the EL34s only, run the gain and bass dimed, and hit it with an SD1 out front, you have a JCM 800 in your Road King. It’s incredible for 80s rock and metal sounds, and you’d have to switch out the power tubes to do this on the Roadster.
IV. The pedal for it is so ridiculous it scares other players from trying to play your amp without asking you first.
V. It just sounds better than all other rectos I’ve owned. I’ve had 7 or 8 rectos now and the one I’ve kept is the RK2.
VII. Yes it’s heavy, but it’s 55 lbs and still marginally smaller than most Marshall and Randall heads.