One is a streaming all-in-one and the other is an amplifier. Judge them on how many boxes you want and what you already own, not on the spec sheet alone.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | A | Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier has more power - 80W against 50W into 8 ohms. That is about 2dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Room size | depends | We rate Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier the better fit for a mid-size room, a large room and a very large room, and Audiolab 6000A for desk or near-field listening and a small room. Match the amplifier to the room you actually have, not the one you want. |
| Grip on hard loads | evenly matched | Both behave much the same into 4 ohms - output increases strongly (130W and 75W). |
| Noise floor | A | Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier is the quieter design on paper - 98dB against 76dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | A | Both decode on board, but only Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier handles MQA. |
| Streaming | A | Only Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier has AirPlay 2, Roon and BluOS. |
| Analogue inputs | B | Audiolab 6000A takes more analogue sources - 4 against 2. |
| Room to grow | B | Only Audiolab 6000A offers a pre-out/main-in loop - which decides whether you can add a subwoofer or a power amplifier later without replacing the box. |
| Price | B | Audiolab 6000A costs less - $899 against $3,199 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | B | Audiolab 6000A is the cheaper watt - about $18 per watt against $40. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier B Audiolab 6000A
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?
Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier is ahead, but on only 1 of the measured areas, and it costs about 3.6x the price. That is a lot of money for a narrow margin - Audiolab 6000A 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 - Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 50 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 30 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear - we rate Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier poorly for near-field use for exactly that reason. Think about the whole system: the roughly $2,300 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.