No single best amplifier here. What decides it is what you have to drive, what you need to plug in, and how much of the system you want in one box.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | B | NAD C 389 has more power - 130W against 75W into 8 ohms. That is about 2.4dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Grip on hard loads | A | Advance Paris X-i75 holds up better into a 4-ohm load: its output increases modestly to 110W, where the other barely increases. That matters with demanding speakers far more than the 8-ohm figure does. |
| Noise floor | B | NAD C 389 is the quieter design on paper - 95dB against 90dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | B | Both decode on board. NAD C 389 goes higher - 384kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Room to grow | A | Only Advance Paris X-i75 offers a pre-out/main-in loop - which decides whether you can add a subwoofer or a power amplifier later without replacing the box. |
| Amplifier class | depends | Advance Paris X-i75 is Class AB-T and NAD C 389 is Class D. Class D runs cool and draws almost nothing at idle. Modern examples of both measure well - judge by the rest of the page. |
| Price | A | Advance Paris X-i75 costs less - $1,299 against $1,499 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | B | NAD C 389 is the cheaper watt - about $12 per watt against $17. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Advance Paris X-i75 B NAD C 389
depends neither is better in the abstract - it turns on your room, your system or how you will use them. Only specs published for both amplifiers are judged; anything missing on either side is left out rather than guessed.
Which should you choose?
The usual trade-off: NAD C 389 measures better, Advance Paris X-i75 costs about 13% less. With most speakers in most rooms that gap is smaller in practice than it looks here. If your speakers are a difficult load - 4 ohms nominal, big woofers, or a sensitivity in the low 80s - Advance Paris X-i75 is the safer partner, because how an amplifier behaves when the impedance drops matters more than its 8-ohm rating. Start with the room. In a large or open-plan room, or with speakers that are hard to drive - low sensitivity, or an impedance that dips - NAD C 389 has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 75 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 55 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear - we rate NAD C 389 poorly for near-field use for exactly that reason.
What a spec sheet cannot show: how either sounds with your speakers, how the controls feel day to day, and what the app is like to live with - which is where most all-in-one amplifiers are actually won or lost. Power figures are the manufacturers' own and are not measured to a common standard, so treat small differences as noise. If you can hear both, that will tell you more than any row above.