The Orange Thunder 30 is a new combo by Orange that is cross between the old Rocker 30 and the Thunderverb amps. The Thunder 30 is loaded with EL84 valves to provide 30-Watts of all-valve power. As you would expect from orange, everything is super-solid, from the sturdy housing to the switches and knobs. Offering Clean and Dirty channels, each with their own volume and tone controls, the Orange Thunder 30 is a great addition to the Orange range of amps.
The Orange Thunder 30 Features Include:
Perfect fat and rich tone, though the EL84 tubes and the hand-wired inside parts!, perfect for stoner/doom/sludge sounds and its high gain, make the amplifier good for metal sounds also, a bit expensive but you can extend it with an other speaker like a head, or cary it as it is, 2 channeled, its perfect for sound maniacs!!!
I've been using this amp for about 2 years now. In 2014 i went to musicstore in Koln looking for a ~1000 eur amp and this one was the only one that i really liked straight away.
This amp has a very warm full tone on both channels, i really like the amount of gain it has as well, you can go from almost clean to crunch and to kinda highgain tone from just tuning the gain knob, or using the volume knob on your guitar.
The clean channel is very clean. Sometimes i find myself just playing some clean stuff just enjoying the tone.
And i also like using my ProCo Rat distortion pedal into the clean channel, sounds great. Very different from the dirty channel, but still this shows that you can use clean channel jsut fine with your favourite distortion pedal if you want to.
There are however several things i wish were made better than they are
1. Clean channel volume is much louder than the gain channel
2. There is no master volume knob
3. Dirty channel has only one EQ knob, which works kinda like contour. Well it actually sounds pretty good, but sometimes i wish this amp had an actual EQ, cuz when playing the dirty channel there is a lot of bottom end and the overal sound is kinda dark-ish.
It's a matter of preference but in my opinion this amp sounds just right for rock-ish stuff. Not sure about really agressive highgain metal, cuz its tone is kinda dark, not that one sharp "in your face one"
Still this is a great sounding amp, i've been using it for rehearsing and live giggin and it does its job just great. Plenty of gain, plenty of volume, plenty of sound and an overall very nice and rich tone. A good choice for its price.