These are not the same size of amplifier: Audiolab 9000A has roughly 2x the power of Audiolab Omnia. That is about 3dB, so it is a question of room size and how hard your speakers are to drive, not of one being the better amplifier.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | B | Audiolab 9000A has more power - 100W against 50W into 8 ohms. That is about 3dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Room size | depends | We rate Audiolab Omnia the better fit for desk or near-field listening and a small room, and Audiolab 9000A for a mid-size room, a large room and a very large room. Match the amplifier to the room you actually have, not the one you want. |
| Grip on hard loads | evenly matched | Both behave much the same into 4 ohms - output increases strongly (75W and 160W). |
| Noise floor | B | Audiolab 9000A is the quieter design on paper - 110dB against 76dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | A | Both decode on board. Audiolab Omnia goes higher - 768kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Streaming | A | Only Audiolab Omnia has Roon and DTS Play-Fi. |
| Analogue inputs | A | Audiolab Omnia takes more analogue sources - 4 against 3. |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Built-in sources | depends | Audiolab Omnia has a CD player built in. That is one less box if you still play discs or listen to radio, and dead weight if you do not. |
| Price | A | Audiolab Omnia costs less - $2,300 against $2,999 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | B | Audiolab 9000A is the cheaper watt - about $30 per watt against $46. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Audiolab Omnia B Audiolab 9000A
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?
Neither runs away with it - they trade advantages. Let the "depends" rows and the speakers you already own settle it. 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 - Audiolab 9000A has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 50 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 50 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear - we rate Audiolab 9000A poorly for near-field use for exactly that reason.
What a spec sheet cannot show: how either sounds with your speakers, how the interface feels 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.