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 | evenly matched | Effectively the same output - 60W against 70W into 8 ohms is under 1dB, which is not an audible difference in loudness. |
| Room size | depends | We rate Hegel H95 the better fit for desk or near-field listening and a small room, and Denon PMA-1700NE 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. |
| Speaker load rating | A | Hegel H95 is rated down to 2 ohms against 4, so it is the safer partner for a low-impedance speaker. |
| Noise floor | B | Denon PMA-1700NE is the quieter design on paper - 107dB against 100dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | B | Both decode on board. Denon PMA-1700NE goes higher - 384kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Analogue inputs | B | Denon PMA-1700NE takes more analogue sources - 3 against 2. |
| Phono stage | depends | Denon PMA-1700NE has a built-in phono stage (MM,MC) and Hegel H95 does not. Decisive if you own a turntable, completely irrelevant if you do not - and an outboard phono stage is easy to add later either way. |
| Room to grow | A | Only Hegel H95 offers preamp outputs - which decides whether you can add a subwoofer or a power amplifier later without replacing the box. |
| Shelf space | depends | Hegel H95 takes up about 23% less shelf area (1505cm² against 1949cm²), and it is 98mm shallower, which is the measurement that decides whether a rack door shuts. |
| Price | evenly matched | Priced within a few per cent of each other. |
A Hegel H95 B Denon PMA-1700NE
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?
Denon PMA-1700NE has the edge on paper, though not by much. The rows marked "depends" are more likely to decide this than the score is. If you play records, Denon PMA-1700NE saves you buying a phono stage; if you do not, ignore that row entirely.
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.