Ben Gregory said:
Not to doubt what you are saying. But I have heard that these amps were the fastest selling and were pretty popular. Maybe I heard wrong or someone was trying to pump em up. I believe what you are saying though, every clip I can find shows people playing power chords with these things and the leads sound just all right.
I had one for a couple years. It's a very cool amp with very little headroom. It's good for open rock crunch tones, but struggles if you want to do anything heavier due to the lack of headroom... it's just too distorted to chug with any clarity or firmness. It's a very loose, saggy amplifier and combined with it's limited headroom it gives up that out of control vibe really easily.
It's a very good amp for classic tones. It gives up the Zeppelin thing really easily. The first time I plugged into it the first thing that popped into my head was Jimmy Page... and about a month later I was shocked to see a picture of Jimmy Page with one in his rig. I guess he feels it doesn the Zep thing really well too.
When I was on the Orange forum the AD30 was indeed the most popular. At the time there was some I-sit-down-to-pee-indy-rock band that was using them, which upped the AD30s profile amongst that crowd. Omar Rodriguez was at about the height of his popularity and driving the AD140's profile up, although many of his fans saw the AD30 as a cheaper option. Lastly, there was the old guy rock dudes, who valued it for it's ability to give up rock tones so easily and at volumes that didn't get them fired from their pub gigs.
I eventually sold mine because I wanted a beefier amp. The AD30 was awesome at what it did, but I needed something that could go bigger and heavier without totally turning to mush on me.
