Hotone just announced the Pulze Jr., a 20-watt stereo battery-powered modeling amp with 52 amp models, 48 cabs, 191 effects, and — the part I care about — ten slots for Neural Amp Modeler and Sound Clone files plus twenty user IR slots. It runs about eight hours on a 3000mAh battery, weighs 2.36 kg, and costs $299 in the US (£249 at UK retailers, €299 in Europe). Black or white, retro-styled, shipping through Thomann and Andertons.
That's a lot of spec sheet for three hundred bucks. Regular readers know where I go next: a spec sheet is not a tone. But there's one feature here that changes what this box is, and it isn't the one in the press release headline.
The NAM Slots Are the Story, Not the AI
Ten NAM/Sound Clone slots on a practice amp means the amp models Hotone shipped are no longer the ceiling. The NAM community has captured thousands of amps — real Plexis, real Rectifiers, real AC30s, most of them free — and you can put ten of them on a battery-powered box that fits on a coffee table. Add the 20 user IR slots and you're picking your own cabs too. If you want the background on what an IR actually is and why the cab choice matters more than most players think, we have a full impulse response guide.
Here's the thing nobody's going to tell you in the launch coverage: ten slots is a hard ceiling, and it will feel small fast. NAM files are addictive to collect. You'll download forty captures in a weekend and then have to cut thirty of them. That's not a knock on the amp — it's a workflow warning. Go in with a plan.
My plan, if I bought one: don't fill ten slots with ten flavors of high gain. Fill them with the amps the onboard models are worst at. Stock modeling engines at this price are usually decent at Fender clean and Marshall crunch, and get thin and papery at the edges — tweed breakup, AC30 chime at the point where it starts to compress, and anything that depends on power-amp sag. Spend your NAM slots there. Let the built-in 52 handle the middle of the road.
About That AI
The Pulze Jr. has "AI-generated presets powered by Hotone AI" and an AI stem splitter that pulls parts out of a song so you can jam over it.
I'm the resident skeptic on tone-from-a-prompt, and I said the same thing when Mooer put an AI assistant in the $96 GE100 Pro. But the honest question isn't "is AI good." It's which kind of AI this is, because that determines how it fails. Viktor wrote the piece on this — generator vs. retrieval — and the short version is that a generator invents parameter values and can confidently hand you something that doesn't work, while a retrieval system pulls from a library of real presets and fails by giving you something merely generic. Hotone hasn't said which architecture they're using. Until they do, treat any AI-generated patch as a starting point you verify, not an answer. Play a real song through it before you trust it on a gig.
The stem splitter is the feature I'd actually use. A drum machine with 100 patterns is fine; a box that pulls the guitar out of the actual song you're trying to learn so you can play the part over the real band is better. That's a practice tool, not a tone gimmick, and it's the kind of thing that quietly justifies the purchase.
The Three-Inch-Speaker Problem
Twenty watts of stereo through dual 3" full-range drivers. Let's be realistic about the physics: two 3" speakers do not move air like a 12" cab, and no amount of modeling fixes that. What you'll get is a tone that images nicely in stereo, sounds impressively full for its size on a desk, and thins out the second you stand up and walk across the room.
This matters for how you dial it in, and it's the single most common mistake I see with small modeling amps. Presets built on tiny speakers get compensated — you push the low end and roll off the highs to make it sound big on the desk — and then those same presets sound boomy and dull everywhere else. We wrote up exactly this trap in why your tone sounds good in headphones and bad in the room.
The practical fix: build your patches through headphones or the USB out, where you're hearing the modeling and not the 3" drivers, and use the onboard speakers for convenience rather than as your reference. The Pulze Jr. works as a USB-C audio interface with loopback and reamp support, so you have a clean path to a real monitoring setup. If your patches need fixing, our dial-in-a-modeler-tone walkthrough is the settings-level starting point.
Where It Lands Against the Competition
This is aimed squarely at the Positive Grid Spark and JBL end of the market, and it's the most feature-dense thing at the price. We ran a three-way practice amp test — Mustang Micro vs. Spark Mini vs. HX Stomp for the after-bedtime bedroom use case, and the Pulze Jr. slots into that conversation with two things none of those three have at once: open NAM loading and a real battery.
The battery is underrated. Eight hours of untethered stereo amp is a busking rig, a back-porch rig, a green-room warmup rig. I run an HX Stomp direct to PA and never put an amp on stage, so I'm not the target customer — but the player who wants to practice on the couch, then take the same tones to a coffee shop gig without a power outlet, is genuinely well served here.
If you're shopping the broader category rather than this specific box, our best modeler under $500 roundup covers the units that will actually hold up as your only rig.
What I'd Wait For
Two things before I'd spend the money.
First, how the 52 stock models feel under your fingers — the dynamic response, whether the gain blooms or just gets louder, whether cleans stay clean when you dig in. Bullet points can't tell you that, and neither can a launch article.
Second, whether the NAM implementation is real or nominal. There's a big difference between "loads NAM files" and "loads NAM files and runs them at full quality without eating half the DSP." Hotone quotes A1 and A2 architecture support, which is the right answer on paper. Reviewers with actual units will settle it.
For $299 with an open capture format and a battery, this is one of the more interesting practice amps of the year. Just don't buy it for the AI.
