Different price classes - Yamaha WXA-50 costs roughly 1.7x what Yamaha A-S301 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 | evenly matched | Effectively the same output - 55W against 60W into 8 ohms is under 1dB, which is not an audible difference in loudness. |
| 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 barely increases. That matters with demanding speakers far more than the 8-ohm figure does. |
| Noise floor | A | Yamaha WXA-50 is the quieter design on paper - 110dB against 99dB. Audible mainly with sensitive speakers in a quiet room. |
| Built-in DAC | A | Both decode on board, but only Yamaha WXA-50 handles DSD. |
| Analogue inputs | B | Yamaha A-S301 takes more analogue sources - 6 against 1. |
| Phono stage | depends | Yamaha A-S301 has a built-in phono stage (MM) and Yamaha WXA-50 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 | evenly matched | The same expansion options on both. |
| Headphones | depends | Only Yamaha A-S301 has a headphone output. Worth something if you listen late, nothing if you never do. |
| Amplifier class | depends | Yamaha WXA-50 is Class D and Yamaha A-S301 is Class A/B. Class D runs cool and draws almost nothing at idle; Class A/B runs warm and is the long-established mainstream choice. Modern examples of both measure well - judge by the rest of the page. |
| Shelf space | depends | Yamaha WXA-50 takes up about 66% less shelf area (572cm² against 1701cm²), and it is 124mm shallower, which is the measurement that decides whether a rack door shuts. |
| Price | B | Yamaha A-S301 costs less - $350 against $599 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | B | Yamaha A-S301 is the cheaper watt - about $6 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 Yamaha A-S301
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 WXA-50 is ahead, but on only 1 of the measured areas, and it costs about 71% more. That is a lot of money for a narrow margin - Yamaha A-S301 is the sensible buy unless a specific feature above decides it for you. 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. If you play records, Yamaha A-S301 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.