I own a vox Valvetronix Ad50 and i love it! I have heard line 6 amps before including the flextone and i like the valvetronix series better. Tube sound will always make your tone sound better than solid state no question. The amp was amazingly cheap at about 350 and the footswitch was 30. My only gripe is with the footswitch because the amp is so versatile but u can't change the amps versatility on the fly so easy, if you were playing live and needed to change an effect u would need to either go over to your amp or have a friend there to switch over to the effect for you. Otherwise your gonna have to manage your effects in 2 channels or less. VOX does offer better footswitches just not with my model of amp. The effects are of course bypassable by the footswitch and they are 24 bit crystal clear sounding. I like the distortion on this amp too! Plenty of balls and they have enough amp models to choose from to give u any sound you'd want. Overall i think this amp is the best you could buy in the price range! it totally destroys my old crate 2x12 (it didn't have effects though). The big difference between this amp and the line 6 flextone is this-

"The Valve Reactor circuit uses a 12AX7 triode vacuum tube together with an actual low-wattage tube power amp circuit, a virtual output transformer and a dummy speaker circuit that simulates the impedance changes of a real speaker. It also reconfigures itself so that its characteristics are the same as the amps it’s modeling (class A, class AB, negative feedback circuit, etc.). This means that all of the nuances of the original amp model including sound, feel, distortion and presence are reproduced accurately" www.voxamps.co.uk