I assume you’re using a real guitar cab as well? So it’s deciding between axefx > tube poweramp > guitar cab, vs axe fx > ss poweramp > guitar cab?
The main disadvantage to both is that if you’re mainly recording it will be easiest to use impulses in the axe fx, so FRFR would be most similar to your recorded tone.
However if you prefer guitar cab for the sake of sound and feel ‘in the room,’ I can understand that. I stayed with guitar cabs for this purpose (also all I ever used was v30 impulses so just having a v30 cab made things simpler for me).
I’ve done axefx > Fryette 2/50/2 (EL34 tubes) > guitar cab, and currently use axe fx > matrix SS poweramp > guitar cab.
Tube poweramp is cool and all, don’t need to set the speaker resonances since what that does is simulate a real tube power amps interaction with the speaker load and it’s impedence curve. In fact, with a tube power amp you’re best off either turning off power amp sims and using the axe fx as a pure preamp, or at least turning down the speaker page hi and lo resonance to 0.
Advantage is, it feels like a tube poweramp, because it is. Downside is some models sound good with a Fryette EL34 poweramp and some don’t. The Mesa models were not as good with this poweramp as they were into a solidstate poweramp with the full poweramp sims enabled. Sure you can run poweramp sims on into the tube poweramp, but you get this overly scooped double-poweramp sound with many of the models. Not all though. A more coloured poweramp like a 2:90 or something is also an option, that I’m sure would make the Mesa models sound great (and conversely probably sound balls with the Marshall models).
Solidstate poweramp takes a bit more effort to set up, since you should find out the low resonance frequency of your cabinet and set it on the speaker page of the amp model, for the best sound. This setup is more flexible also, since the Mesas sound like Mesas, Marshall’s sound like Marshall’s, etc.
