Out of everybody who compares these amps on youtube, I'd probably trust OIa to dial the amps the closest. So many dudes on youtube (not all of them by any means, but a lot), even if they're going to the trouble of making comparison videos, either just don't give enough of a damn to bother with dialing them in close enough for anything remotely resembling a "scientific" kind of comparison, or they simply don't have the ear and technical skill to dial them to sound close at all. They'll dial the knobs with their eyes or something, and the videos will show the amps sounding very different and they'll just happily conclude that "welp hey look yep these amps are obviously wildly different ahyuck!" without so much as even attempting to tweak a single control the entire time. Or they just don't realize that due to the weird control curves of the pots on Mark amps, at certain places on the dials of both the knobs and the GEQ, that literally something like 1 millimeter's worth of nudging can lead to multiple db's of signal change and throw off any kind of comparison you could make.
Ola's videos make all three of these amps sound the closest out of any other Mark comparison videos I've seen. To me, the JP2C always sounds just a little bit fatter in the pre-distortion EQ area. But the real IIC+ and Mark VII in IIC+ mode sound almost identical, to the point where even if you're literally watching the stems in the DAW and tracking the hard cuts between the amps with zero silence in between, it's very difficult to tell a cut has been made at all. I mean maybe there's a tiny difference, but it's small enough that I could see the same difference existing between two identical actual IIC+ amps easily as well.
Based on that video, if I wanted a IIC+ sound, I'd be totally 100% happy with a Mark VII.
