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 | NAD M32 has more power - 150W against 105W into 8 ohms. That is about 1.5dB, which is a small step in loudness but real headroom on peaks. |
| Grip on hard loads | A | Rega Elicit MK5 holds up better into a 4-ohm load: its output increases strongly to 162W, where the other barely increases. That matters with demanding speakers far more than the 8-ohm figure does. |
| Built-in DAC | evenly matched | Both have a DAC on board with much the same capability. |
| Analogue inputs | evenly matched | The same number of line-level inputs (4). |
| Amplifier class | depends | Rega Elicit MK5 is Class A/B and NAD M32 is Class D. Class A/B runs warm and is the long-established mainstream choice; Class D runs cool and draws almost nothing at idle. Modern examples of both measure well - judge by the rest of the page. |
| Price | evenly matched | Priced within a few per cent of each other. |
| Watts per dollar | B | NAD M32 is the cheaper watt - about $22 per watt against $32. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Rega Elicit MK5 B NAD M32
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?
NAD M32 has the edge on paper, though not by much. The rows marked "depends" are more likely to decide this than the score is. If your speakers are a difficult load - 4 ohms nominal, big woofers, or a sensitivity in the low 80s - Rega Elicit MK5 is the safer partner, because how an amplifier behaves when the impedance drops matters more than its 8-ohm rating.
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.