Stratus vs Neural DSP Nano Cortex: NAM vs Neural Capture

Last updated: August 31, 2026. Nano Cortex specs below come from Neural DSP's own announcement and update pages; all sources are listed at the end.

Neural DSP is the prestige name in capture technology — the Quad Cortex defined the category in 2020, and the $549 Nano Cortex distills that Neural Capture magic into a palm-sized pedal. The Chaos Audio Stratus lives one shelf over at $299: also compact, also capture-powered, but built around an open format and a generative AI instead of a proprietary ecosystem. If you're weighing these two, you're really choosing between two philosophies of where your tone should live. Here's the honest breakdown.

The short version

• Nano Cortex is the best on-device capture experience in guitar. Plug an amp into its XLR capture input and it clones the thing in minutes — no computer, no app required — at the same resolution as the $1,849 Quad Cortex. Stereo outs, a headphone jack, and the polished Cortex Cloud app round out a genuinely premium package. Stratus doesn't capture on-device — it plays the open NAM ecosystem instead, where half a million captures already exist.
• Stratus is a full rig; Nano is a capture player with a garnish of effects. Nano's chain is seven fixed blocks with three post-FX slots (chorus, delay, reverb — plus tremolo since NanOS 2.2.0) and no looper. Stratus runs 19 free effects in any order, a 5-minute looper, and an AI that writes brand-new effects from scratch.
• The formats tell the story. Neural Capture is proprietary and excellent. NAM is open, free, and comes with published test data — including results against Neural's own captures. And Stratus costs $250 less.

Side by side

Two capture philosophies

Neural DSP's way: Neural Capture is the crown jewel, and the Nano makes it absurdly convenient — plug your amp into the XLR capture input and clone it in minutes, entirely on-device, at the same resolution as the flagship Quad Cortex. Neural has also been generous with the library lately: 1,393 Quad Cortex factory captures came to Nano owners free, on top of thousands of community and artist captures in Cortex Cloud. If you own amps you love and want them digitized by you, nothing on the market makes that easier.

The Stratus way: we bet on the open standard. Stratus runs Neural Amp Modeler Architecture 2 natively, with 500,000+ free captures and IRs browsable from the app — and the format's performance isn't a marketing claim, it's published: quantitative testing across 39 tones plus a blind study with over 1,000 participants, where A2 came out ahead of the major formats tested, Neural DSP's V2 captures among them. Their data even showed A2-Lite — the variant Stratus runs — outperforming the Quad Cortex's captures while using about half the CPU of a $3 chip. Test code and data are open source, so don't take our word for it; take the data's. The trade: Stratus doesn't create captures on the pedal itself — capturing your own rig happens through NAM's free tools, then loads to the pedal.

Effects and the chain

Neural kept the Nano's effects section deliberately small and deliberately good: a DC-2W-style chorus, a warm BBD-style analog delay, a hall reverb, and — as of NanOS 2.2.0 — a tremolo, plus an adaptive gate and a near-zero-latency transpose. Quality over quantity is a coherent design choice, and the firmware team keeps adding to it. But there's no looper, and the chain is seven fixed blocks.

Stratus treats the chain as the whole point: 19 effects free in any order you like, as many as the CPU carries, a 5-minute looper with unlimited overdubs, premium effects from $14.90, community effects free on Chaos Cloud — and the AI FX Builder, which writes brand-new effects as FAUST DSP code from a description (multiple rounds of compilation checks, automated code review, and audio testing; ~95% of builds deliver a working effect; 30 free builds monthly). Nano gives you a beautifully finished set of tools; Stratus hands you the workshop.

On stage and at home

The Nano earns its premium in stagecraft details: gapless preset switching, stereo TRS outs, an expression input, TRS MIDI, and a proper headphone jack for silent practice — that last one being something Stratus skips entirely. The no-screen design divides people; the Cortex Cloud app is genuinely excellent, but on a dark stage you're navigating by knob LEDs.

Stratus counters with preset depth: 14 sounds reachable hands-free through its color-coded footswitch pairs, 128 stored, and a full USB-MIDI map covering every preset, per-effect bypass, and looper transport. It's mono by design, and lighter than the Nano by half a pound. If your set needs many sounds per night, the Stratus switching story is the deeper one; if your set needs one great captured amp in stereo, that's the Nano's lane.

The Quad Cortex question

Worth naming the elephant: Neural's $1,849 Quad Cortex is the flagship — 7" touchscreen, 50+ amp models, 70+ effects, a looper, and V2 capture creation. The Nano exists to distill it, and it does. The Stratus isn't chasing either of them at their own game; it's a different bet — that an open format, an effects-first chain, and a generative AI beat a closed ecosystem at a third of the Nano's price gap from zero. All three are real answers for different players.

Cost of ownership

Nano Cortex: $549 in, with everything included and a free, steadily growing Cortex Cloud library — no subscriptions, no paywalls, and Neural's firmware record has been genuinely generous. Stratus: $299 in, 19 effects free, premium effects from $14.90 (22-effect bundle $99), half a million free captures, and 30 free AI builds a month with paid tiers above. The $250 difference buys on-device capture, stereo, and a headphone jack; keeping it buys the looper, the open chain, and the AI — with change left over.

Openness

Neural Capture is proprietary — captures live inside the Cortex ecosystem, which is polished and well-tended but closed. Stratus is open end to end: NAM as the capture format, FAUST source access for every AI-built effect (Advanced Mode shows the code), free VST/AU plugin versions, and a Tone Shop where third-party developers keep 75% of every sale. If your captures matter to you long-term, the format they're stored in matters too.

Which should you buy?

Buy the Nano Cortex if: you own amps and pedals you love and the idea of cloning them yourself, on the pedal, in minutes, is the feature — and you want stereo outs, headphone practice, and the most polished capture ecosystem in the business behind you. At $549 it's a premium product that earns the word.

Buy the Stratus if: you want the whole rig — an effects chain you design, amps from the open capture format with published evidence behind it, a looper, deep MIDI, and an AI that invents effects — for $250 less. That's the pedal we built.

Sources

• Neural DSP — Nano Cortex announcement (price, dimensions, seven blocks, factory captures, IR system, capture workflow)
• Neural DSP — NanOS 2.2.0 (V2 Capture player, tremolo, summed outputs)
• Neural DSP — 1,393 captures for Nano Cortex users
• Sweetwater — Nano Cortex listing (preset/slot counts, I/O detail)
• Guitar World — Quad Cortex vs Nano Cortex (Quad Cortex specs and pricing)
• TONE3000 — NAM Architecture 2 (A2) (test methodology and results; code and data are open source)
• Chaos Audio — Stratus product page (Stratus specs and pricing)

Want the open rig? The Stratus is $299 with free US shipping — and your first 30 AI builds are on us every month.