One is a streaming all-in-one and the other is an amplifier. Judge them on how many boxes you want and what you already own, not on the spec sheet alone.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | B | FiiO AIR AMP has more power - 90W against 55W into 8 ohms. That is about 2.1dB, so it plays usefully louder before it runs out and has more in hand on peaks. |
| Room size | depends | We rate Yamaha WXA-50 the better fit for desk or near-field listening and a small room, and FiiO AIR AMP for a mid-size room, a large room and a very large room. Match the amplifier to the room you actually have, not the one you want. |
| Grip on hard loads | A | Yamaha WXA-50 holds up better into a 4-ohm load: its output nearly doubles to 105W, where the other increases modestly. That matters with demanding speakers far more than the 8-ohm figure does. |
| Built-in DAC | B | Both decode on board. FiiO AIR AMP goes higher - 768kHz against 192kHz. Very few recordings exist above 192kHz, so treat this as headroom, not as sound quality. |
| Streaming | evenly matched | Only FiiO AIR AMP has Roon. Neither list is longer in a way that matters - check the one service you actually pay for. |
| Analogue inputs | evenly matched | The same number of line-level inputs (1). |
| Room to grow | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Price | B | FiiO AIR AMP costs less - $300 against $599 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | B | FiiO AIR AMP is the cheaper watt - about $3 per watt against $11. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Yamaha WXA-50 B FiiO AIR AMP
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?
FiiO AIR AMP is the easier recommendation: it leads on most of the measured areas and costs less. Take Yamaha WXA-50 if one of the "depends" rows above describes your system. If your speakers are a difficult load - 4 ohms nominal, big woofers, or a sensitivity in the low 80s - Yamaha WXA-50 is the safer partner, because how an amplifier behaves when the impedance drops matters more than its 8-ohm rating. 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 - FiiO AIR AMP has the headroom, and headroom is what stops an amplifier hardening up on peaks. At desk distance or in a small room, 55 watts is already more than most people ever use, and the extra 35 watts would be headroom you pay for and never hear - we rate FiiO AIR AMP poorly for near-field use for exactly that reason.
What a spec sheet cannot show: how either sounds with your speakers, how the interface feels 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.