These are not the same size of amplifier: Rotel RA-1592 MKII has roughly 2.5x the power of Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier. 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 | A | Rotel RA-1592 MKII has more power - 200W against 80W into 8 ohms. That is about 4dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Room size | depends | We rate Rotel RA-1592 MKII the better fit for a large room and a very large room, and Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier for desk or near-field listening, a small room and a mid-size 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 (350W and 130W). |
| Noise floor | A | Rotel RA-1592 MKII is the quieter design on paper - 103dB against 98dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | A | Both decode on board. Rotel RA-1592 MKII goes higher - 384kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Streaming | B | Only Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier has AirPlay 2 and BluOS. |
| Analogue inputs | A | Rotel RA-1592 MKII takes more analogue sources - 4 against 2. |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Price | evenly matched | Priced within a few per cent of each other. |
| Watts per dollar | A | Rotel RA-1592 MKII is the cheaper watt - about $16 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 Rotel RA-1592 MKII B Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier
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?
Rotel RA-1592 MKII has the edge on paper, though not by much. The rows marked "depends" are more likely to decide this than the score is. 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 - Rotel RA-1592 MKII has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 80 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 120 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear - we rate Rotel RA-1592 MKII poorly for near-field use for exactly that reason.
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.