Different price classes - NAD C 268 costs roughly 1.6x what Emotiva DRA-1 does. Expect it to lead on paper; the question is whether you will hear the difference through the speakers you own.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | A | Emotiva DRA-1 has more power - 100W against 80W into 8 ohms. That is about 1dB, which is a small step in loudness but real headroom on peaks. |
| Analogue inputs | evenly matched | The same number of line-level inputs (2). |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Amplifier class | depends | Emotiva DRA-1 is Class A/B and NAD C 268 is Class D. Class A/B runs warm and is the long-established mainstream choice; 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 | Emotiva DRA-1 costs less - $799 against $1,299 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | A | Emotiva DRA-1 is the cheaper watt - about $8 per watt against $16. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Emotiva DRA-1 B NAD C 268
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?
Emotiva DRA-1 is the easier recommendation: it leads on most of the measured areas and costs less. Take NAD C 268 if one of the "depends" rows above describes your system. Think about the whole system: the roughly $500 saved by taking the cheaper one would buy better speakers or a subwoofer, which does more for the sound than the difference between two competent amplifiers.
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.