Different price classes - Emotiva BasX A2+ costs roughly 3.2x what Yamaha R-S202 does. Expect it to lead on paper; the question is whether you will hear the difference through the speakers you own.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | B | Emotiva BasX A2+ has more power - 160W against 100W into 8 ohms. That is about 2dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Analogue inputs | A | Yamaha R-S202 takes more analogue sources - 4 against 2. |
| Price | A | Yamaha R-S202 costs less - $250 against $799 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | A | Yamaha R-S202 is the cheaper watt - about $3 per watt against $5. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Yamaha R-S202 B Emotiva BasX A2+
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 R-S202 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 - Emotiva BasX A2+ has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 100 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 60 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear - we rate Emotiva BasX A2+ poorly for near-field use for exactly that reason. Think about the whole system: the roughly $549 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.