One is a streaming all-in-one and the other is an amplifier. Judge them on how many boxes you want and what you already own, not on the spec sheet alone.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | B | Onkyo Muse Y-40 has more power - 75W against 45W into 8 ohms. That is about 2.2dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Grip on hard loads | B | Onkyo Muse Y-40 holds up better into a 4-ohm load: its output nearly doubles to 150W, where the other increases modestly. That matters with demanding speakers far more than the 8-ohm figure does. |
| Noise floor | A | LEAK Stereo 130 is the quieter design on paper - 108dB against 100dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | A | Both decode on board. LEAK Stereo 130 goes higher - 384kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Streaming | B | Only Onkyo Muse Y-40 has AirPlay 2 and Chromecast. |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Amplifier class | depends | LEAK Stereo 130 is Class A/B and Onkyo Muse Y-40 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 | evenly matched | Priced within a few per cent of each other. |
| Watts per dollar | B | Onkyo Muse Y-40 is the cheaper watt - about $13 per watt against $22. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A LEAK Stereo 130 B Onkyo Muse Y-40
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?
Onkyo Muse Y-40 has the edge on paper, though not by much. The rows marked "depends" are more likely to decide this than the score is. If your speakers are a difficult load - 4 ohms nominal, big woofers, or a sensitivity in the low 80s - Onkyo Muse Y-40 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 - Onkyo Muse Y-40 has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 45 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 30 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear.
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.