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 | LEAK Stereo 230 has more power - 75W against 60W into 8 ohms. That is about 1dB, which is a small step in loudness but real headroom on peaks. |
| Room size | depends | We rate Hegel H95 the better fit for desk or near-field listening and a small room, and LEAK Stereo 230 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 | LEAK Stereo 230 is the quieter design on paper - 109dB against 100dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | B | Both decode on board. LEAK Stereo 230 goes higher - 768kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Analogue inputs | evenly matched | The same number of line-level inputs (2). |
| Phono stage | depends | LEAK Stereo 230 has a built-in phono stage (MM) 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. |
| Use with a TV | depends | Only LEAK Stereo 230 has HDMI ARC, so the television can drive it directly and one remote controls the volume. If the system is for music only, this changes nothing. |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Price | B | LEAK Stereo 230 costs less - $1,695 against $2,000 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | B | LEAK Stereo 230 is the cheaper watt - about $23 per watt against $33. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Hegel H95 B LEAK Stereo 230
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?
LEAK Stereo 230 is the easier recommendation: it leads on most of the measured areas and costs less. Take Hegel H95 if one of the "depends" rows above describes your system. If you play records, LEAK Stereo 230 saves you buying a phono stage; if you do not, ignore that row entirely. If this sits under a television, LEAK Stereo 230 is the one to buy - HDMI ARC means the TV remote controls the volume and there is no second box in the way.
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.