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 | evenly matched | Effectively the same output - 125W against 130W into 8 ohms is under 1dB, which is not an audible difference in loudness. |
| Grip on hard loads | evenly matched | Both behave much the same into 4 ohms - output barely increases (125W and 130W). |
| Noise floor | A | Parasound NewClassic 200 Integrated is the quieter design on paper - 100dB against 95dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | B | Both decode on board. NAD C 389 goes higher - 384kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Analogue inputs | A | Parasound NewClassic 200 Integrated takes more analogue sources - 4 against 3. |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Price | A | Parasound NewClassic 200 Integrated costs less - $1,399 against $1,999 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | A | Parasound NewClassic 200 Integrated is the cheaper watt - about $11 per watt against $15. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Parasound NewClassic 200 Integrated B NAD C 389
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 NewClassic 200 Integrated is the easier recommendation: it leads on most of the measured areas and costs less. Take NAD C 389 if one of the "depends" rows above describes your system. Think about the whole system: the roughly $600 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.