Hotone Ampero II Stomp

Thomann sent me a USED unit instead of brand new sealed, I didn't buy a b-stock and the unit was opened and with even some presets modified and fingerprints all over the screen... that bothered me a bit considering I paid for a new unit. Sound wise I thought this thing would be truly great but i was very wrong , it has some fx that are ok , but in general and to be honest it sounds very plastic and too digital with very noticeable horrible latency and big lack of dynamics, I'm very experienced with multi Fx but even tweaking a lot every sound still sound plastic like it or not, the pitch effects are truly horrible with tons of latency and digital crackling, only distortion sounds sound a bit decent but nothing amazing, is better to use the IR included instead of amps and cabinets cos they sound truly bad and muddy, if someone tells you that this thing sounds like analog pedals or real amps is lying or very confused. As a gigging professional guitarist for more than 40 years and having had tons of multi fx , pedals etc... this one is nothing amazing or good enough for professional situations, for a truly great sound I will still using my analog pedals and amp, this Amper is still a toy for kids in my eyes after hearing how it sounds and how it feels when you play.... however if u are an experienced guitarist you can make it sound good enough, just like you would do with any other device, but don't expect a miracle out of this box I'm telling ya !!! all the best

I bought this to decide if I would be fine with something much more affordable than a Quad Cortex. In short, I wasn't, but I think I could have been.

The UI is really cool: It's blocks of elements in a signal chain like Quad Cortex and others, but it has its own style and is a bit simpler. The entire pedal is also really small and sturdy, it feels like it would easily survive a drop. All in all, really nice design and it feels like a very compact (and even friendly?) little thing.

Now, onto the sounds: I only liked some of the presets unfortunately. Some of the more ambient ones were quite nice and the few "jazz-y" ones I also really liked, but the distorted tones I did not like as much. On other units and some plugins I really enjoy turning down the volume knob on the guitar and playing with dynamics, which did not work well for me on the Ampero II. The support for scenes in the 2.0 firmware could probably improve that, but I wanted to do it without additional work.

Some of the tones, especially some of the distortion stuff, also had that "digital"/modeler sound to it, some top-end frequencies that sound a bit thin to me. I've seen some tips online that playing with the equalizer options could take care of that and I also tried that a bit, but again I prefer things sounding really nice out of the box and then only tweaking after a bit.

So, not for me unfortunately, but the Stomp can do similar things to other modelers and with some equalizer work can probably sound really nice. I'll keep the Quad Cortex instead which is much more expensive, but I've been enjoying the tones from that pretty much always. But this little pedal is still really neat for its price and was certainly worth a try! (And for some reason the design really appeals to me, it's almost cute, but also sturdy.)