These are not the same size of amplifier: Parasound Halo JC5 has roughly 2.5x the power of Parasound Halo A23+. That is about 4dB, 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 | Parasound Halo JC5 has more power - 400W against 160W into 8 ohms. That is about 4dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Grip on hard loads | evenly matched | Both behave much the same into 4 ohms - output increases strongly (240W and 600W). |
| Analogue inputs | evenly matched | The same number of line-level inputs (2). |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Price | A | Parasound Halo A23+ costs less - $2,500 against $7,000 at list. |
A Parasound Halo A23+ B Parasound Halo JC5
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?
Parasound Halo JC5 is ahead, but on only 1 of the measured areas, and it costs about 2.8x the price. That is a lot of money for a narrow margin - Parasound Halo A23+ is the sensible buy unless a specific feature above decides it for you. 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 - Parasound Halo JC5 has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 160 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 240 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear - we rate Parasound Halo JC5 poorly for near-field use for exactly that reason. Think about the whole system: the roughly $4,500 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.