These are not the same size of amplifier: Mark Levinson No.536 has roughly 2x the power of Mark Levinson No.585.5. That is about 3dB, so it is a question of room size and how hard your speakers are to drive, not of one being the better amplifier.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | B | Mark Levinson No.536 has more power - 400W against 200W into 8 ohms. That is about 3dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Grip on hard loads | B | Mark Levinson No.536 holds up better into a 4-ohm load: its output nearly doubles to 800W, where the other increases strongly. That matters with demanding speakers far more than the 8-ohm figure does. |
| Built-in DAC | A | Mark Levinson No.585.5 has a DAC on board; the other needs an external one, which is another box, another power lead and another purchase. |
| Analogue inputs | A | Mark Levinson No.585.5 takes more analogue sources - 4 against 2. |
| Phono stage | depends | Mark Levinson No.585.5 has a built-in phono stage (MM and MC, selectable 50, 60 or 70 dB gain) and Mark Levinson No.536 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. |
| Price | A | Mark Levinson No.585.5 costs less - $16,575 against $18,500 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | B | Mark Levinson No.536 is the cheaper watt - about $46 per watt against $83. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Mark Levinson No.585.5 B Mark Levinson No.536
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: Mark Levinson No.536 measures better, Mark Levinson No.585.5 costs about 10% less. With most speakers in most rooms that gap is smaller in practice than it looks here. If your speakers are a difficult load - 4 ohms nominal, big woofers, or a sensitivity in the low 80s - Mark Levinson No.536 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 - Mark Levinson No.536 has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 200 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 200 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear - we rate Mark Levinson No.536 poorly for near-field use for exactly that reason.
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.