I have no clue what the real deal 1073’s sound like. All I know is everything I put through this (kick, snare, heavy guitars, and bass, so far…) sounds better than if it’s just straight into my interface. For the money, it has given me what I hear to be a better sound. No added noise. No distortion. Decent quality given the previous reputation of Behringer. I plan to upgrade the output xformers and maybe the caps. It may all be SMD components which makes swapping caps difficult, if not impossible.