These are not the same size of amplifier: Yamaha R-N800A has roughly 2x the power of Audiolab 6000A. 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 R-N800A 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. |
| Built-in DAC | A | Both decode on board, but only Yamaha R-N800A handles DSD. |
| Streaming | evenly matched | Only Yamaha R-N800A has AirPlay 2. Neither list is longer in a way that matters - check the one service you actually pay for. |
| Analogue inputs | B | Audiolab 6000A takes more analogue sources - 4 against 3. |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Price | B | Audiolab 6000A costs less - $899 against $1,400 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | A | Yamaha R-N800A is the cheaper watt - about $14 per watt against $18. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Yamaha R-N800A 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?
The usual trade-off: Yamaha R-N800A measures better, Audiolab 6000A costs about 36% less. With most speakers in most rooms that gap is smaller in practice than it looks here. 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 R-N800A 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. Think about the whole system: the roughly $501 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.