Siblings in Yamaha's A-S range, so they share a design and a house sound. It comes down to power, features and price.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | evenly matched | Effectively the same output - 100W against 100W into 8 ohms is under 1dB, which is not an audible difference in loudness. |
| Bass control | evenly matched | Similar damping factor (240 vs 240). |
| Noise floor | evenly matched | Much the same signal-to-noise ratio (99dB vs 99dB). |
| Built-in DAC | A | Both decode on board. Yamaha A-S801 goes higher - 384kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Analogue inputs | evenly matched | The same number of line-level inputs (6). |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Price | B | Yamaha A-S701 costs less - $800 against $900 at list. |
A Yamaha A-S801 B Yamaha A-S701
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?
The usual trade-off: Yamaha A-S801 measures better, Yamaha A-S701 costs about 11% less. With most speakers in most rooms that gap is smaller in practice than it looks here.
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.