Siblings in LEAK's Stereo range, so they share a design and a house sound. It comes down to power, features and price.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | A | LEAK Stereo 230 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. |
| Room size | depends | We rate LEAK Stereo 230 the better fit for a mid-size room, a large room and a very large room, and LEAK Stereo 130 for desk or near-field listening and a small room. Match the amplifier to the room you actually have, not the one you want. |
| Grip on hard loads | evenly matched | Both behave much the same into 4 ohms - output increases modestly (115W and 65W). |
| Noise floor | evenly matched | Much the same signal-to-noise ratio (109dB vs 108dB). |
| 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 | evenly matched | The same number of line-level inputs (2). |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Shelf space | depends | LEAK Stereo 130 takes up about 23% less shelf area (1115cm² against 1454cm²), and it is 103mm shallower, which is the measurement that decides whether a rack door shuts. |
| Price | B | LEAK Stereo 130 costs less - $995 against $1,695 at list. |
A LEAK Stereo 230 B LEAK Stereo 130
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?
The usual trade-off: LEAK Stereo 230 measures better, LEAK Stereo 130 costs about 41% less. With most speakers in most rooms that gap is smaller in practice than it looks here. 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 - LEAK Stereo 230 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 - we rate LEAK Stereo 230 poorly for near-field use for exactly that reason. Think about the whole system: the roughly $700 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.