These are not the same size of amplifier: Onkyo Muse Y-50 has roughly 2.1x the power of Cambridge Audio CXA61. That is about 3.2dB, 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 | A | Onkyo Muse Y-50 has more power - 125W against 60W into 8 ohms. That is about 3.2dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Grip on hard loads | A | Onkyo Muse Y-50 holds up better into a 4-ohm load: its output nearly doubles to 250W, where the other increases strongly. That matters with demanding speakers far more than the 8-ohm figure does. |
| Noise floor | B | Cambridge Audio CXA61 is the quieter design on paper - 105dB against 100dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | B | Both decode on board. Cambridge Audio CXA61 goes higher - 384kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Streaming | A | Only Onkyo Muse Y-50 has AirPlay 2 and Chromecast. |
| Phono stage | depends | Onkyo Muse Y-50 has a built-in phono stage and Cambridge Audio CXA61 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. |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Amplifier class | depends | Onkyo Muse Y-50 is Class D and Cambridge Audio CXA61 is Class A/B. Class D runs cool and draws almost nothing at idle; Class A/B runs warm and is the long-established mainstream choice. Modern examples of both measure well - judge by the rest of the page. |
| Shelf space | depends | Onkyo Muse Y-50 takes up about 23% less shelf area (1225cm² against 1595cm²), and it is 21mm shallower, which is the measurement that decides whether a rack door shuts. |
| Price | B | Cambridge Audio CXA61 costs less - $1,099 against $1,500 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | A | Onkyo Muse Y-50 is the cheaper watt - about $12 per watt against $18. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Onkyo Muse Y-50 B Cambridge Audio CXA61
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: Onkyo Muse Y-50 measures better, Cambridge Audio CXA61 costs about 27% 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 - Onkyo Muse Y-50 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-50 has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 60 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 65 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.