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 | Peachtree Carina has more power - 300W against 200W into 8 ohms. That is about 1.8dB, which is a small step in loudness but real headroom on peaks. |
| Grip on hard loads | evenly matched | Both behave much the same into 4 ohms - output nearly doubles (400W and 580W). |
| Noise floor | A | Schiit Wotan is the quieter design on paper - 124dB against 116dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | B | Peachtree Carina has a DAC on board; the other needs an external one, which is another box, another power lead and another purchase. |
| Headphones | depends | Only Peachtree Carina has a headphone output. Worth something if you listen late, nothing if you never do. |
| Amplifier class | depends | Schiit Wotan is Class A/B and Peachtree Carina 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 | Peachtree Carina is the cheaper watt - about $7 per watt against $10. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Schiit Wotan B Peachtree Carina
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?
Peachtree Carina has the edge on paper, though not by much. The rows marked "depends" are more likely to decide this than the score is. If you already own a DAC or a streamer, the built-in one is money you are paying twice for, and Schiit Wotan becomes the more rational buy.
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.