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 | Anthem STR has more power - 200W against 160W into 8 ohms. That is about 1dB, which is a small step in loudness but real headroom on peaks. |
| Grip on hard loads | B | Anthem STR holds up better into a 4-ohm load: its output nearly doubles to 400W, where the other increases strongly. That matters with demanding speakers far more than the 8-ohm figure does. |
| Noise floor | B | Anthem STR is the quieter design on paper - 120dB against 103dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | A | Both decode on board. Parasound Halo HINT 6 goes higher - 384kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Analogue inputs | A | Parasound Halo HINT 6 takes more analogue sources - 8 against 5. |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Headphones | depends | Only Parasound Halo HINT 6 has a headphone output. Worth something if you listen late, nothing if you never do. |
| Amplifier class | depends | Parasound Halo HINT 6 is Class A/AB and Anthem STR is Class A/B. 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 | Parasound Halo HINT 6 costs less - $3,199 against $5,000 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | A | Parasound Halo HINT 6 is the cheaper watt - about $20 per watt against $25. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Parasound Halo HINT 6 B Anthem STR
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?
Neither runs away with it - they trade advantages. Let the "depends" rows and the speakers you already own settle it. If your speakers are a difficult load - 4 ohms nominal, big woofers, or a sensitivity in the low 80s - Anthem STR is the safer partner, because how an amplifier behaves when the impedance drops matters more than its 8-ohm rating. Think about the whole system: the roughly $1,801 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.