These are not the same size of amplifier: Yamaha A-S801 has roughly 2x the power of HiFi Rose RS201E. That is about 3dB, 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 | Yamaha A-S801 has more power - 100W against 50W into 8 ohms. That is about 3dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Room size | depends | We rate Yamaha A-S801 the better fit for a mid-size room, a large room and a very large room, and HiFi Rose RS201E for desk or near-field listening and a small room. Match the amplifier to the room you actually have, not the one you want. |
| Noise floor | evenly matched | Much the same signal-to-noise ratio (99dB vs 100dB). |
| Built-in DAC | B | Both decode on board, but only HiFi Rose RS201E handles MQA. |
| Streaming | evenly matched | Only HiFi Rose RS201E has Roon. Neither list is longer in a way that matters - check the one service you actually pay for. |
| Analogue inputs | A | Yamaha A-S801 takes more analogue sources - 6 against 1. |
| Phono stage | depends | Yamaha A-S801 has a built-in phono stage (MM) and HiFi Rose RS201E does not. Decisive if you own a turntable, completely irrelevant if you do not - and an outboard phono stage is easy to add later either way. |
| Room to grow | A | Only Yamaha A-S801 offers A/B speaker terminals - which decides whether you can add a subwoofer or a power amplifier later without replacing the box. |
| Amplifier class | depends | Yamaha A-S801 is Class A/B and HiFi Rose RS201E 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. |
| Shelf space | depends | HiFi Rose RS201E takes up about 63% less shelf area (672cm² against 1792cm²), and it is 172mm shallower, which is the measurement that decides whether a rack door shuts. |
| Price | A | Yamaha A-S801 costs less - $900 against $2,195 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | A | Yamaha A-S801 is the cheaper watt - about $9 per watt against $44. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Yamaha A-S801 B HiFi Rose RS201E
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?
Yamaha A-S801 is the easier recommendation: it leads on most of the measured areas and costs less. Take HiFi Rose RS201E if one of the "depends" rows above describes your system. 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 - Yamaha A-S801 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 50 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear - we rate Yamaha A-S801 poorly for near-field use for exactly that reason. If you play records, Yamaha A-S801 saves you buying a phono stage; if you do not, ignore that row entirely.
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.