Can This Amp Change My Mind About EL84's? | Orange AD30 

EL84's - yay or nay?

I came for the review.. stayed for the playing.. and rewatched for the signature faces Leon makes while playing

What a stooky video as usual Leon. I love my orange crush 35rt amp, though that EL84 sounds stooky as well. I quite like the tone at 3:05, as it sounds stooky to me. Once again thank you for providing stooky videos

Mate, that sounds beautiful. The edge of breakup tones are superb

my friend led our worship team for a few years using an ad30 half stack. amazing pedal platform. he used my fender mij fotoflame strat w/corona custom shop 57 neck, lindy vintage hots w/bassplate, and callaham hardware. touchdown!

Those amps are very articulate. You can hear every note. I noticed it on a th30 that’s when I fell in love with orange

Riff! Raff! Such a fun riff/song to play...

Nice! Yea the orange stuff has its own thing! I have a little micro terror and it's really loud and I get a beautiful clean for pedals out of it,and some deep "st Vitus" doom tones 🤘

I love el84. They have a killer grind while keeping clarity.

I'll never forget when I was checking all of the amps on the Line 6 Stomp for clean tones and A/B them when I stumbled on a great, lush, mid-forward tone. Was so fun to play and sounded great and I looked down and it was the Orange. I couldn't believe it. Never would have thought to try it for cleans but was my top 5 cleans in the Helix. Love the video. You showed the amp's character really well.

Yay for me. I have one of the twin channel heads and also a Rocker 30 head, so I have the best of both worlds. EL84s and a valve rectifier vs. EL34s and a solid state rectifier. The AD30 tends to suit my Teles, P90s and mini-humbuckers, the Rocker 30 is better for full-size humbuckers. Quite different sounding, but also somehow both very Orange. It's getting hard to ignore that new OR30...

man you knocked it out of the park here with tone. really thinking about buying the newer version

One of my favorite amps I own is a Mesa rocket 440 (4x10 combo). It spanks. I think if you have an amp that takes advantage of their uniqueness instead of just chucking them into something high gain they can be great tubes.

I think a simple MXR micro amp boosting it further would yield incredible results. I used that pedal on the cranked clean of a TH30 to get vintage lead tones and i had the dirty channel to play and that channel could play any modern metal.

I really hope you can feature a Rockerverb on the channel one day because I think you’ll enjoy its high gain sound. I like orange amps. Just not the price tag 😂.

Orange is so underrated these days. You really have to play one yourself. Loud.

I had the Super Crush for awhile. Ran an MXR 6 band on it and was fantastic

I’ve had an OR100 for years, I love it.

Some of the best tones you ever had on your channel. Suits your playing style really well

NAY! EL84s always have a choked sound to me. The Orange doesn’t sound bad, but there just isn’t the headroom I gravitate to and when trying to get higher gain sounds, they sort of collapse on themselves. It’s kind of like somebody tossed a blanket over the cab. However....paired with another big-bottle amp live or in the studio, I’m sure some great sounds can be achieved.

really liked the clean chimey tones Did I hear 'Gold' 😁

Very Cool, Thankyou. Stunning Sounding Amp and Playing as always. I have not owned an Orange Amp yet, but am always looking to get one...... Just Because, lol. Most probably not as high spec/cost as this awesome sounding amp, but probably a more 'entry level', but still thinking Tube amp. Any recommendations? Cheers

The Friedman Pink Taco is pretty impressive for an el84 amp. It was too tight for my liking, so I sold it. But that’s one of the best sounding amps I’ve ever owned.

1st.this is a great amp.well played bro.🙏👍👍🌷🌷🎸🎸🎸🔥🔥

Love my peavey c50 4x10 with el84s

Oh nice! A single channel AD30 too!

You should try the new OR30. Its like an AD30 that can get even heavier and tighter.

Hi my friend. Do you know the difference of sound between this Ad30 and the new orange Or30?

Yeah!!

Worth it for the wee hinty-poo of Heaven and Hell. Always wanted to like Orange Amps, just the aesthetics alone are awesome, but they just don't do it for me. They're definitely an acquired taste.

If you ever get a chance to play a Dr Z. You will dig it. Vox Marshall rip all hand wired goodness. I have a Maz Jr and it’s my favorite amp. Does it all.

Oh yes!

Pretty chewy for 84s... impressive

Maybe it’s just the speakers you’re playing through but this sounds a lot darker and fuzzy compared to the 2 channel version.

Probably one of the best sounding el84 amps I’ve played was the OR15. To the question el84 yay or nay at least for high gain rock and metal, it’s a nay for me . I had a Rectoverb 25 and I thought it was great until I got a DSl20 suddenly I never used the Rectoverb 25 unless I was also using the dsl at the same time, and then as Leon said it was glorious . I bet the AD30 would sound great with one your Marshalls Leon. El84 amps can do a lot of things but for articulate high gain they fall apart in a “muff” like way that’s not for me. I’d like to see Leon review some of the EL84 Friedman’s everyone says Dave Friedman is the only one that can make el84 sound like big glass. If you want to play metal on a lower wattage amp, get a DSL20 or MT15 or if you can spend a little more the Marshall studio 20 watt stuff . Let’s get real honest for a second though you could get you a 350 dollar Boss ME-90 a Duncan Power Stage and spend the big money on a good 2x12 from Orange or Boogie and could do just about anything you needed to from JC120 cleans to Thrash to super modern chugga chugga, in fact you could probably dust your old Peavey Bandit and run a ME-90 and play anywhere you’d ever need to.

I have tried and tried and tried to find a single channel AD30!!

Orange amps have never really been my thing. To me they sound pretty flubby in the low end and as you said Leon, they have their own thing going on. They certainly look cool though. I was wondering whether adding an overdrive pedal would tighten the low end up a little? And then you did it LOL. But it still sounds like it's farting out a bit there. Maybe a treble booster in there? I reckon you'd be in Black Sabbath heaven. Did you ever try the Artist Tweedtone with EL84's?

I don't know if it's EL34's vs EL84's or what, but not particularly my cup of tea. I enjoyed what I heard in the demo, but I guess I'm just so much a Marshall nut it didn't sound right to me. Which is not to say I would mind having one around. It'd be nice to have choices.

I always liked the EL34's better. Thats just me though. Still sounds good, but they do have some kind of muddy darkness to them.

Best amp orange ever made

Orange amps all seem to be more in the fuzzy gain category rather than distortion type gain of Marshall family of amps. I don’t care for it personally.

why didn't you crank it to 10? Its very plexi/JTM45 when crancked ;)

AD-30 is the 🐐

“ when the lights go down in a California town”

I’ve always liked the AD30 TCH …….But now I’m going to go down the Swollen Pickle Wabbit hole 🕳️🤦🏼‍♂️🥸😂

Good enough for Jimmy Page, good enough for you...and me

6l6...still beef kings

Too "doom metal" for me. Nice clean tone but that distortion is just too muddy. The SD-1 seemed to brighten it up a bit.

Nope no nada nein….this Orange is based in a misunderstanding of low mid overdrive and how EQ curve reacts with a mid range instrument.

The pedal makes it sound a lot better. 😀

I don't hear any major difference between this and other EL84 amps such as Mini Rectifier, all sound great. Seriously, all the bottom end gets cut out by sound guy anyway...

El84s just don't have the headroom, ive had several el84 amps and they all were unreliable as hell nothing but problems out of the power tubes.. the friedman pink taco v2 is an amazing sounding amp but I just can't buy something with that tube configuration again.

A little too grimmy for me. I like the sound tho. I like el34s better. 😀

I generally like the sounds *other* players get with Orange amps (Ty Tabor's tour rig, for example), but whenever I plug into one it sounds like a room temperature stick of butter rolled in used playground sand. 😆

Nahh

It's probably just me, but i never liked orange tones. They all sound..farty? to me. I don't like fuzz either, so that's probably it

They're ok for what they are but more like a one trick pony

For hi gain, who really cares for power tubes .. it is all preamp distortion mess. Why you even asking ? 🤣 You could play a transistor radio instead. That said, I have an AD 50, CS handwired and all that hoopla. It is a solid amp, dependable. Puts all el84 amps to shame. None of that screeching chalk, shuttering glass sound. El 34s rule, if youre into hearing the amp cooking, with no pedals. Same with 6V6s .. Three 70s Hiwatt DRs, old plexi and metal panel 1987s here, with some tweed amps, 59 Gibsonette-.. my El84 amps just collect the dust.. Dr.Z, Orange something.. Since you´ve asked 😇