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 - 75W against 70W into 8 ohms is under 1dB, which is not an audible difference in loudness. |
| Grip on hard loads | B | Denon PMA-1700NE holds up better into a 4-ohm load: its output nearly doubles to 140W, where the other increases strongly. That matters with demanding speakers far more than the 8-ohm figure does. |
| Noise floor | evenly matched | Much the same signal-to-noise ratio (109dB vs 107dB). |
| Built-in DAC | A | Both decode on board. LEAK Stereo 230 goes higher - 768kHz against 384kHz. 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. |
| Room to grow | A | Only LEAK Stereo 230 offers preamp outputs - which decides whether you can add a subwoofer or a power amplifier later without replacing the box. |
| Shelf space | depends | LEAK Stereo 230 takes up about 25% less shelf area (1454cm² against 1949cm²). |
| Price | A | LEAK Stereo 230 costs less - $1,695 against $2,099 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | A | LEAK Stereo 230 is the cheaper watt - about $23 per watt against $30. 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 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?
LEAK Stereo 230 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 - Denon PMA-1700NE is the safer partner, because how an amplifier behaves when the impedance drops matters more than its 8-ohm rating.
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.