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 | B | Schiit Tyr F has more power - 200W against 125W into 8 ohms. That is about 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 | Schiit Tyr F is the quieter design on paper - 120dB against 100dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | A | Onkyo Muse Y-50 has a DAC on board; the other needs an external one, which is another box, another power lead and another purchase. |
| Phono stage | depends | Onkyo Muse Y-50 has a built-in phono stage and Schiit Tyr F 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. |
| Use with a TV | depends | Only Onkyo Muse Y-50 has HDMI, so the television can drive it directly and one remote controls the volume. If the system is for music only, this changes nothing. |
| Headphones | depends | Only Onkyo Muse Y-50 has a headphone output. Worth something if you listen late, nothing if you never do. |
| Amplifier class | depends | Onkyo Muse Y-50 is Class D and Schiit Tyr F 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. |
| Price | A | Onkyo Muse Y-50 costs less - $1,500 against $1,699 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | B | Schiit Tyr F is the cheaper watt - about $8 per watt against $12. 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 Schiit Tyr F
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: Schiit Tyr F measures better, Onkyo Muse Y-50 costs about 12% 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 - Schiit Tyr F has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 125 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 75 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear - we rate Schiit Tyr F 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.