Different price classes - LEAK Stereo 230 costs roughly 1.7x what Audiolab 7000A 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 | evenly matched | Effectively the same output - 75W against 70W into 8 ohms is under 1dB, which is not an audible difference in loudness. |
| Grip on hard loads | evenly matched | Both behave much the same into 4 ohms - output increases strongly (115W and 110W). |
| Noise floor | evenly matched | Much the same signal-to-noise ratio (109dB vs 110dB). |
| Built-in DAC | A | 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 | B | Audiolab 7000A takes more analogue sources - 3 against 2. |
| Room to grow | B | Only Audiolab 7000A offers a pre-out/main-in loop - which decides whether you can add a subwoofer or a power amplifier later without replacing the box. |
| Price | B | Audiolab 7000A costs less - $999 against $1,695 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | B | Audiolab 7000A is the cheaper watt - about $14 per watt against $23. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A LEAK Stereo 230 B Audiolab 7000A
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?
Audiolab 7000A is the easier recommendation: it leads on most of the measured areas and costs less. Take LEAK Stereo 230 if one of the "depends" rows above describes your system. Think about the whole system: the roughly $696 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.