Orange Super Crush 100 - 100-watt Solid-state 1 x 12" Combo - Black Reviews

Love this amp . Playing my new t5z thru it but better yet my Ibanez is sounding great all thru this amp

After a month of playing the Orange Super Crush 100 Combo, I love this amp. I'm having so much fun messing with the settings and playing all my favorite songs, getting more and more impressed with this amp. The combo amp is well built. It sounds amazing cranked up to 12 o'clock and beyond. For metalheads, such as myself, it's got tons of gain and lots of punch, and it plays effects pedals very well. I love that the amp settings are color coded, so I know orange means the Dirty channel and Black is the clean channel. On top of all the power in the Dirty channel, when you put it to the Clean channel, it sounds beautiful. It's very easy to use and it sounds great. It's far exceeded my expectations. Orange knocked it out of the park with this amp, and it's not even a tube amp, which makes it even more impressive.

This amp is well built and sturdy. It really shines when the volume is cranked up (channel volume and main volume both at least at 2 o'clock). I use the clean channel with my pedals and this thing really handles its power very well. The 150w Celestion 12" speaker pairs very well with the power output and the sound stays amazingly clear when it is cranked up. You can tell the speaker has no problem handling the power of the amp. You really do feel Like you get the most of each watt. The Super Crush 100 combo is great for practice and can easily hang on the stage with drums and a full band and be heard as clear as day. Great bang for the buck. No need to go back to tubes. This amp also brings simplicity. Easy to use and customize your sound.

I've had the privilege to try alot of gear. I have had the line 6 helix, Marshall DSL 40, Orange OR15, Rocker 15, Jim Root Terror, Dark Terror, Boss Katana MK ii, Blackstar HT5, and I had buddy lend me his Rockerverb mkiii combo for about a month. I got rid of most of those things for various reasons. The Super Crush 100 is everything I could want in an amp. It's plenty loud enough to play with a drummer and quiet enough to play with the kids asleep. It takes pedals extremely well but still sound great on its own. If your on the fence about it just buy it. It far exceeded my expectations which were already kind of high.

I did a lot of studying about this amp before I made this purchase. I don't do gear reviews but this one has inspired me. I have been fooling with this guitar addiction for almost 40 years. I have gone down the rabbit hole like a whole bunch of other players and spent thousands of dollars on tube amps over the years! This amp is really, really good! As a matter of fact, I'm selling the last tube amp I own. I don't need it anymore! This thing is small, light and punches like a Heavey weight! I play mostly blues and classic rock. I do still go out and gig from time to time. The amp is touch sensitive and reacts like a tube amp to your picking. You tube videos do not do this amp justice. Its sounds good on them but actually playing through it is shocking. Put your tube amp bias aside and try one. It will re inspire you're playing! As soon as I started playing through this amp my wife stuck her head in the door of my studio with a look of shock on her face! She has only done that a couple of times in 32 years! For today's club gigging player, I think this amp is more than worthy of my comments. I can't wait to take it out clubbing, it's going to shock a lot of players! This amp is not a one trick metal pony, it can do it all and the reverb is excellent! I tried a CR 60 a few years ago and hated it. I sold it very soon after I bought it! This is not Like the CR series at all, it's a whole other animal! Orange colored way outside the lines on this one! I am now a huge orange fan! One more thing, the build quality is excellent!

I LOVE this amp. it's plenty loud and totally keeps up with loud drummers and the such. The tone for being a solid state amp is incredible. I love not having to worry about tubes, but still get a shockingly close tone to them. Having the DI out has been great at bigger shows where I can run it into the PA and bring up the amp without any added drum bleed that would come from mic'ing it up. The two channels of reverb and distortion are perfect when paired with a footswitch. Overall I'm super happy with this amp and I love the 1x12" portability. Small, loud, killer tone. What's not to love?!

Although I love the amp, mainly because it has a closer to tube sound than any other solid state amp, but I did have some issues.
First, the posting for the amp lead me to believe that it comes with a footswitch. If an amp doesn't, the spec sheet usually says "optional". Without a footswitch any two channel amp is not gig worthy. I figured, not a huge problem. I asked the Sweetwater sales guy to send me one. They were out of stock. I called several other stores, same thing. Out of stock. I went to the Orange website and they didn't even have it listed as an item they sell. I finally found one at Sam Ash but they had to have it shipped to the local store. It took four days, but at least I have one now. I opened the box and guess what. The footswitch doesn't come with aa cord.
OK, so I finally got that settled. And for those of you who think it's not such a big deal, imagine yourself at a gig and you have to walk back to your amp and throw a switch every time you take a lead solo and then walk back to the amp to switch it back to the clean channel. Same with the reverb. Like I said, it's not gig ready out of the box.
There is one more issue I'd like to point out. Now remember I said that I love the sound of this amp and I probably wouldn't trade it for anything else. The issue is the power. Orange says this amp is 100 watts RMS through an 8 ohm speaker. That's probably the main reason I bought it. I'll give it a strong 75 watts, but defiantly not 100.
I'm OK with the amp, but not jumping for joy.

First things first, I really like this amp and it's probably my favorite amp I've ever owned. It sounds really great- on the clean sound. The dirty channel is not my cup of tea, but we'll get to that. Here's the good stuff:

- Plenty of headroom. I use this amp as a pedal platform, and all that headroom is great because I can get a consistent sound at any volume. Throwing a tube screamer on it with the distortion turned all the way down gives you that low headroom edge of breakup sound at any volume you want. Or just run straight into the clean channel with no pedals and enjoy.

- Great build quality. This amp is built in the style of a classic amp. A lot of solid state amps are built kinda cheap and plastic-y, but this one isn't. It absolutely holds up when compared to professional quality amps.

- Everything you need with nothing you don't. It's got the essential features, and some nice things that I'd consider optional such as the effects loop and an XLR line out, but at its core this amp is a dead simple amplifier that does one job and does it well. If that's what you're looking for, you'll enjoy this amp. If you want more modern conveniences like built in effects or MIDI control or saved presets, this isn't for you.

- Good implementation of the foot switching. There are two separate jacks for reverb and channel select footswitches, which are not included. I use a boss dual footswitch with a TRS cable and a TRS to TS splitter and it works great. I prefer this over having a single stereo jack because if you only wanted to use the switch for one thing, it's super easy to just plug the footswitch into the one thing you want to control at your feet. I don't use a footswitch with this amp often, but it deserves a thumbs up for having the foot switches implemented in such a good way, and using standard quarter inch cables so it's not some proprietary connector or anything.

Those positives are enough to make me love this amp. I really think it's the best amp I've ever owned, and I like the sound of it better than some much more expensive amps I've had the pleasure of using and gigging with in the past. It's a well built amplifier with a great clean channel that takes pedals very well and with that great tone as a starting place you can mold the sound into whatever you want. However, there are some issues.

- The dirty channel sounds absolutely awful to me. This may be personal preference, but I think the dirty channel is just unusable for the kinds of sounds I like. It's really harsh, and a bit lifeless and I simultaneously feel like I can't get it to sound bright enough but it's already too harsh in the upper harmonics. Really, I think this amp needs a presence control. I'm going to try a few more experiments, though, such as putting an EQ pedal in the effects loop to try to cut some of the really high frequencies. But again, I get my distortion through pedals 99% of the time anyways so in real life, I just leave it on the clean channel and never bother with the dirty channel. To my ears, it sounds like the distortion is just clashing with itself in a really ugly way in the upper treble range, and boosting the dirty channel with a tube screamer just makes it uglier.

- The speaker is much more directional than any other speaker I have ever owned. This amp really needs an amp stand to sound its best, and even then I feel like I have to stand right in front of it to get the best sound, or else turn up to the point where it's filling the room. Not a massive problem, but it has given me grief when taking the amp gigging and I've been told I'm too loud despite the fact that I could barely hear myself. An amp stand solved that problem, but I haven't had that issue with other amps.

- The XLR line out is really bad and poorly implemented. I could forgive it for sounding bad, but it's worse than that. It sounds really harsh, there's loads of noise that isn't coming out of the speaker but is coming out the XLR out, and also by the way the line out is positioned after the master volume in the signal chain, which drives me insane because I want the XLR out to be a consistent volume no matter where the master volume is set, especially if I wanted to do silent recording. On other amps, you can turn the master volume all the way down and still get sound out of the line out. On this amp, if the master volume is all the way down, there is no sound coming out of the line out. This is terrible design and very poorly thought out. As a workaround, though, you can use the effects loop send as a kind of makeshift line out that works regardless of what the master volume is set to, but then the built in reverb doesn't work and you need a cab sim. Speaking of cab sims, the built in cab sim is pretty bad. So, for all intents and purposes, this amp does not have a line out. It can work in a pinch, but you're better off throwing a microphone in front of it and forgetting about the XLR out.

These issues are frustrating, but there's a straightforward fix to each of them, and if you use this amp in a way that plays into its strengths, it's a really great amplifier. I'd recommend this amp if you're looking for a loud pedal platform with a killer clean channel and you plan on providing your own dirt and effects to suit your tastes. Or maybe you'll like the dirty channel, in which case disregard all the crap I said about it because you should use your ears and make your own decisions. With that said, the dirty channel is horrible.