It's not about being "a little bit better" IMHO, as an HM-2 is quite a different beast from the metal zone. In fact, the HM-2 is AMAZING, depending on the tone you're after. The HM-2 contains pure fucking old school death. Just put all the knobs on full. That's how they did it at Sunlight.
Exactly. The guy who wrote The Swedish DM book actually has a video on Youtube and maxes out everything and gets the exact tone playing some Entombed riffs and also says something about metal-zones being shit.