Orange Bass Terror – First Review!
By MNJ
| Posted in Guitar
The Orange Bass Terror has landed. Well not quite, we’ll have to wait a few more weeks until the first shipment has arrived, but this reviewer has been lucky enough to see it, hear it and play through it and I’m here to tell you, it’s sensational!
You cannot believe an amp this small can pump out 500 Watts, and that’s at both 8 and 4 ohms. It’s the same size as the Tiny Terror, about the same weight, and uses two ECC83 preamp valves and a Class D solid state power section. The single input has a pad for use with active instruments and there’s a gain and master volume. The three band EQ is cut or boost from the centre point giving a wide variety of tonal possibilities. The speaker outputs located on the rear are two Speakon sockets, which are safer than jack leads in my opinion although it’s always advisable to carry a spare one. Cleverly positioned on the side of the Terror Bass is a DI out using an XLR connector and an effects loop with mono jacks. That’s about it, apart from the fact it’s supplied in the rather natty woven gig bag.
Plugged into an Orange SP212 Isobaric cabinet, it’s immediately apparent that this is going to be a winner for Orange. At low volume it sounded suberb, at mid volume it sounded superb and loud…well, you’ve guessed it. First off, there were absolutely no rattles or vibrations from the cabinet or amp chassis, just the pure note, and with the active EQ it’s possible to get all the regular bass sounds that a jazzer, blueser, pit player and rock player would need on a small to mid size gig. It doesn’t do extremes, but then why would you expect it to?
You’d be hard pushed to make this amp sound bad. I found the tone sweet and musical, nothing missing in the frequency ranges except for extreme top end as mentioned. Antony Gunter, Orange’s UK Sales Manager told me that the Bass Terror was, “designed in response to bass players asking for their version of the Tiny Terror”. Orange already shared a manufacturing facility in the far east that was producing the Class D technology so marrying up a valve pre amp and a solid state power amp was a canny move, and one that will no doubt prove as spectacularly successful as the Tiny Terror.
Antony summed up: “The Bass Terror is the amp that bass players have been looking for for the last 20 years”. I’m with him on that.
Tags: bass terror, orange
I bought the terror bass amp, which sounded great out of the box. I put a vintage telefunken smooth plate and an electrharmonix short plate in the unit and this thing is outrages! The chinese tubes that it comes with do sound good despite what I have heard about them, just dont trust them I guess. The preamp in this amp is better sounding to me than the ampeg 7 pro version of this style of amp. Blues on ya!
Duffy Double Down Norton