Hello, I've had this unit for quite a while now and didn't have the time to tweak it properly up till now. I went and did my research about the full-models vs pre's, the connectivity and also reading up on MeAmBobbo's guide (awesome work, great guide!). After hours of mucking around, I managed to come up with a decent Marshall-ish tone with it. I'm going for that warm, distorted tone but with a lot of hair when you do chords and stuff (Paramore, earlier Taking Back Sunday). The current tone I have is too muddy and lacks clarity in the notes when I do some chords. My questions are :

1. Could it be that the headphones I'm using to monitor (Audio Technica ATH M-30) not translate the tone well to my ears? If that's the case, what's the best and fairly cheap solution for me to do so?

2. Do I need to start eq-ing the tone out? I try not to eq as I'm terrible at it.

Here's my setup. I'm using a Gibson (Wine Red) LP Studio through the POD HD 500 and through my M-30's.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT:

Here's my POD HD 500 h5e file : http://www.mediafire.com/?dhjx90a9icr707l

The MP3 sample of the tone I'm using : http://bit.ly/GPAgza

Here's the guitar tone I'm after (Paramore's Ignorance) : http://bit.ly/RBxyF