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Tiny, but not terrible, the Orange Tiny Terror

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It’s fair to say that for many gigging musicians the thought of transporting a full Orange stack without the help of at least one burly roadie is somewhat intimidating. Imagine, if you will, an Orange head that packs in all the juicy raunch that the company’s amps are famous for, while managing to fit inside a gigbag most people would expect to contain nothing more than an SLR camera and a couple of rolls of film.

It’s not the first time Orange has dabbled in the low-wattage arena; 1 x 10 and 1 x 12 AD15 15-watt combos in the late nineties were joined by the limited edition AD5, a five-watt hand-wired valve combo that has become a collector’s item. Now for the first time, an Orange valve amplifier is being manufactured outside of the UK in China, although the design process remains 100 per cent home grown.

Opening the Tiny Terror's cardboard packaging, we are confronted with a generously padded black nylon gigbag with a shoulder strap and embroidered Orange logo. An extra pocket provides room for mains and speaker leads and other accoutrements, while an opening in the top of the bag reveals the Tiny Terror’s chromed carry-handle echoing the ‘roll bars’ on the full size heads.

Unzipping the gigbag unveils one of the coolest looking and instantly desirable bits of kit that we’ve seen in a long time. With its white powder-coated finish, the aluminium chassis looks like a component from a funky retro-futurist hi-fi, while the quartet of valves that peak through the grille provide reassurance that it’s far from being merely a kitsch practice amp.

Under the hood is Orange’s first EL84-based circuit since the aforementioned AD series amplifiers. The Tiny Terror features a pair of EL84s in the output section, while the preamp utilises a pair of ECC83s. Far Eastern manufacture may be keeping the price tantalisingly low, but as far as we can tell there is no lack of quality; everything feels just as rugged as Orange’s UK valve gear.

The volume, tone and gain pots have a familiarly smooth action, while the space-saving three-position switch toggles the amp between off, standby and on and is as rugged as we’d expect. A second, two-position toggle flips between 15 and seven watts, lowering the plate voltage in pentode mode, rather than running the EL84s in a triode or single-ended configuration. Around the back, a trio of 6.4mm speaker outputs facilitate the connection of a single 16- or eight-ohm cabinet, or a pair of eight-ohm cabs should you desire to be bold.

Before powering up and igniting that iconic orange jewel light, we hook the Tiny Terror up to the new Chinese-made Orange 1 x 12. The dimensions have been upped from those of the existing PPC112 cabinet, so that any of the full-size Orange heads fit perfectly on top. Also, rather than a Vintage 30, a 100-watt Celestion G12K has been utilised to ensure that the 1 x 12 could happily be used with say, a Rockerverb 50, without any worries about speakers blowing. It makes for a compact, yet powerful mini-stack.