Thinking about this and drawing from my own experience I'd like to add the following.
An all tube AC15 will give very similar tones to an AC30, as we all know The Shadows were using those on the early recordings.
I have had the reissued TV front AC 15 from Vox (The Heritage) as well as a few weeks use of a friend's JMI AC15 and each had the EF86 circuit and delivered the tone. The only reason for moving them on was that they lacked volume for live gigs.
Fast forward to today and I have re-located my Vox Valvetronix AD50VT into a very lightweight pine cabinet and added a Celestion Creamback Neo speaker to keep the weight down and I use it on the AC15 setting miked up through our desk, after comparing with the Vox AC30/4, Pinnacle and my original 1960l Watkins Dominator and it does the job perfectly. The big difference was putting the Creamback speaker in there, it sounds as good as the Vox Blues. That amp cost me less than £200 brand new in 2004.
I have spent a lot of money in the past to get to where I am with the sound and happily for me I have sold all of that stuff and got my money back, at the same time learning some big and very useful lessons.
Yes, the AC30 is a very necessary tool if you are in a gigging Shadows type outfit, but there are other ways to achieve the sound.
For instance, the TVS3 sounds incredibly close just DI'd into a recording desk if you get the tone right at the input. Not an amp in sight. Because it has a preamp circuit built in to emulate Hanks's early sound, the TVS3 delivers the tone on almost any guitar amp with careful setting up of the GAIN and TONE controls.
Another way which I have been using is by my Zoom G5n into the desk, or the Kemper Stage unit, each of which I programmed the parameters to get the sound. It's all about understanding the tone.