Well I’ve been deliberating about this for a very long time and finally made my mind up.
Just bought a Roland Blues Cube Hot. It’s a 30W solid state combo with a 12” speaker. These amps have been around for quite a long time now. I have been using the Orange Crush 35RT for nearly 2 years, which is a similar powered combo with a 10” speaker.
So why did I change amps, especially as I think the Orange is a good sounding amp? I like the clean sounds that you can get out of the Orange. IMO It’s a really good amp and not expensive. Even though it’s SS the clean channel breaks up nicely …… but only at high volume. The caveat is that the amp is super loud and the tone at lower volumes is not anywhere near as good as at high volume and the dirty channel at lower volumes sounds pathetic. Again, turn up the volume on the dirty channel and it’s impressive. Built like a rock too. 9 o’clock on the volume on the clean channel is already pretty loud and that’s where it starts to sound really good.
I only play in my apartment in Switzerland and my neighbours do not appreciate a really loud amp. Which is definitely fair enough.
So I bought the Blues Cube Hot because you can also have nice cleans and also very easily dial in to a point where it breaks up without putting it to very high volumes. It also has a power switch on the back to take the power down to 15w (still way too loud), 5w (good for cleans, still too loud for dirty), 0.5W (good for everything in an apartment and yes remarkably the tone sounds similar at low volumes to at higher volume).
I’m still trying to dial in the exact tones I like. Got lovely tones immediately on my Strat but had to fiddle around a bit with the tone for the tele. I still have to experiment more. I have to say, that is easier with the Orange as the Strat and tele sound good on very close settings.
All the reviews (professional and actual users) say that the Blues Cube has been modelled to mimic a Fender Bassman ‘59 and that it has a real valve amp feel in terms of sensitivity. I really can’t know as I never played any valve amps and I don’t really care either. But you can get very different tones by digging in or playing soft - but you can do that a bit on the Orange too (but not as well).
So all in all, it serves my purposes of a nicer tone at neighbour acceptable levels.
So what about my Orange? Well I have a home for it. At my house in France, I have a neighbour who’s into death metal and he told me not to worry about the volume and to crank up the amp as loud as I want!!! My wife likes the look and sound of the Orange (basically because it’s not black) so it’s getting a new home and I’ll let my death metal neighbour plug into it from time to time and I’ll put in earplugs.
Before anyone asks why I didn’t go the computer and modelling route to get my tone at low volume, it’s because I like the simplicity of plugging into an amp with as few dials as possible that can cause distraction and I don’t like using my computer in the evening after a full day of that. Not too many dials to play around with on either amp. I’m just old school!
So my conclusions are that both are really nice sounding amps but the Roland has a better range of tones that still work at low power output. Is the Roland worth double the price of the Orange. Probably not IMO, unless you neeed good tone at low volumes.
Both amps look good. Here are some pics of the amps. Despite how it looks in the photos, both amps are almost the same size.
Volume dial on the Roland goes up to 12 which is one more than on Spinal Tap 
. Which one will it be, hummmmm… 