Joshua, a friend and local audiophile is a distributor for this preamp and surprised me with it a few weeks ago. In our group of listening buddies, we sometimes loan gear so we can determine how it sounds with someone else's system. That was the intent with this preamp.
As we all know, how a unit sounds has to be taken within context of the system it is in. Within my system, it sounded very very good, but not so good as to make me sell the Pass XP-20 and buy one. However, it would be a difficult choice to have to choose between the two if I were without a preamp. In many ways there was a similarity to their sound, especially in transparency, with the transistor amp subjectively more neutral and the tube amp a little warmer in the lower frequencies. The Incito weighs in at 75 pounds and I was very glad I didn't have to lug it up and down the stairs! That's one of things about it that I didn't care for. Another was that when using the XLR outputs, the sound level was much higher and couldn't be turned down to a low listening level, so it was medium to loud listening, or not at all. It had a very clear sound and I didn't feel like I was missing any of the music's details. The bass was a pleasant surprise in that it was very full with very little bloat. I liked the way acoustic bass was reproduced with this preamp, but electric bass seemed very slightly bloated and not quite as musical as when reproduced via the Pass, to my ears, but still very enjoyable. It is very possible that this extra bass could have been reduced via a few less bass traps in my listening room, as I have six of them! I enjoyed the extra bloom that seems to come with a tube pre and the slightly more 3 dimensionallity. One thing that was a little peculiar sounding to me was that sometimes I perceived what could possibly be a phasing aberration, in that the staging of some instruments were positioned strangely in the soundstage. It was not unpleasant, but I did find that I was thinking from time to time that a particular sound should be coming from that depth, not that depth. It's hard to explain.
The first few hours I listened to it, there was an annoying sound coming from my right speaker that I could hear from my listening seat between songs. When music was playing, it was inaudible. I thought perhaps a tube was going south. A few days later, I reinserted it into the system and the right channel cleaned up to an acceptable quietness, with only a little more than a very slight hissing coming from the right channel. My ear had to be within a foot or two from the speaker to hear it. The left channel was almost silent, with just a minimum of hiss when my ear was placed close to the speaker. Noise became a nonissue once I was a foot or more from the speakers.
That's it. The link I provided really says it all about the sound quality of this pre, at least I agree with it.
