I'll totally agree with you there man, I used to get some really nice tones out of my POD XT going into the poweramp of my Marshall. You can get a great range of sounds using a modeller and a cheap 6l6 and el34 based valve head (Windsor and Valveking?)
How exactly did you do this? Do you just plug it into the fx-loop input?
I've got a valveking and this sounds pretty interesting.