I’ve owned 3 CMD121Ps and a Jeff Berlin 15 combo over the years, and all were good to me. I still own 1 - an Italian 121P from 2011 and it is the best sounding and loudest one of the bunch (besides the JB combo... which I only had for about 6 months and sold because it wasn’t really all that louder than my 121P, but almost twice as big, so it literally wasn’t worth its weight to me). The 2 Indo 121Ps I had were still good quality, but there was no doubt the Italian one had some “umph” that the Indo ones did not quite have. The Indos would both would start to fart out where my Italian one still had another 10-15% more headroom at that point before it would begin to fart out in the same way (which I really had to push it farther than I ever would under normal circumstances to get to that point).
The Italian 121P is the only class A/B of the bunch, and the only one with a B&C speaker (as opposed to the MB Yellowline speakers in the Indos). So to assume that a different power amp and different speaker couldn’t result in better quality and/or reliability IME, is incorrect. There was a noticeable difference in volume, and even a little difference in sound quality between the ones I’ve owned. It’s why I still have the Italian one.
As far as repairs go, for an tiny 1x12 combo amp that costs about 3 times more than most 1x12s, not having good resources to repair them in the USA (and anywhere outside of mainland Europe) is a shame and pretty unacceptable IMO. I hope the 121P I still have has a lot of life left in it, because it sounds like it’s cheaper and easier to just buy a used LM3 than try to get one repaired. Markbass needs to do better than this if they want to keep their International customer loyalty - it seems the brand has lost a lot of steam in recent years.
