Went to J an B at SM Pampanga on Wednesday and bought myself an Orange Crush 30R. It is solid state and I know you guys all know that I am one of those persistant tube amp types.
When I bought the amp, I bought it with the intention of letting my German friend convert it into an all tube amp. But I gotta say, this is the best sounding solid state amp I have ever played through.
Cleans are pristine with the gain low, but you can crank the level and gain up with it on the clean channel and get an awesome dirty blues sound - no need for the overdrive if you are just doing the blues.
The overdrive channel gives great crunch. I think they should have named this amp the Orange Crunch instead of the Orange Crush. Great crunch ala AC/DC type sounds at high gain.
Now for metal heads, this is NOT a metal amp by any means. Great with no effects for blues, dirty blues, classic rock and hard rock but not for metal. However there is an overdrive pedal input. All you gotta do is hook a distortion pedal in that and you got your metal distortion. You don't have to hook your guitar into the distortion pedal, just the distortion pedal in the amp.
This is one great amp and sounds as warm as any tube amp I have ever played. Great price too, as I only payed around 9.5k for it. I read on harmony central complaints about it sounding like a toy or hardly any reverb. Not the case in mine. Very rich warm sounding tone and the reverb at 2 is more than enough. Anything more than that and the reverb gets a bit overwhelming.
I did make one change in the amp. When I got it home, I took the back off and saw that the reverb tank was only attached with one screw, so I put 3 more screws in it so that each screw hole has a screw. The other thing I did is that I had a Celestion Vintage 10 inch speaker, because when I bought the one for my Laney conversion, I had to buy two. The Orange Speaker was great, but I had this $200 speaker just laying around, so I put it in there in place of the orange speaker. Not much difference - a little warmer, a little more top end on the clean and a little more bottom and top end on distortion - but not enough to really rant and rave about.
God I love getting all this stuff and playing around with it. I have ordered three Xavier guitars from Guitar Fetish. Can't wait till they get here. I got the thinline semi hollow telecaster and stratocaster and one of the Xavier Les Paul Clones. These guitars get great reviews. I'll write about those when I get them and I'll put pics of this orange amp on here when I figure out how to use this new digital camera my wife bought.
God Bless,
Doc
