Since you guys resurrected, I'll do a follow up.
Right driver failed again a week after getting the headphones back. They didn't respond to a RMA request for about a week, I think they were getting suspicious of me. This time, I drove down to Foutain Valley (30-60 min depending on traffic) and dropped them off, mostly to reccy Audez'e's facilites but also cause I hate waiting for things in the mail. They didn't give me a tour, but they offered to upgrade the headband to leather. Less than a week later, headphones were ready for pickup and Dr. C., Audez'e CTO, offered to come in on a Sunday to answer questions and let me demo LCD-3 and my headphones on their amp. Don't get mad at me here, but I'm not sure what kind of amp it was, I think WooAudio, it was big, had two boxes, blue light on the front, definitely not SS. Here's some of what we talked about:
1) Most of their driver failures are caused by improperly annealed aluminum traces, breaking after a random number of flexes.
2) The different woods are chosen for cosmetic reasons, should have no impact on the sound. Mass of the driver is much less than the mass of the housing and they do not want housing resonance anyway.
3) Playing clipped music is bad for headphones if you have a powerful amplifier because average levels are higher, so rms voltage is higher. LCD-2 can handle a lot of power and he pretty much laughed at my E9 (well, he actually said no way E9 can destroy the LCD-2).
4) If you're ears are not shaped like the dummy head ears used, frequency response graph is not what you are hearing.
5) He's a vinyl guy and said frequencies that are not audible can still affect the way music sounds. I asked if he meant like high frequency alias artifacts and he said no, we can't hear above 20kHz but we can still feel when those frequencies are absent. I didn't want to argue, especially with someone who's called Doctor.
6) The peaks you see in impedance plots of most headphones is where the resonant frequency of that driver is. At that frequency, the driver moves a lot more than at other frequencies, so...uh, actually I forget what he was telling me. If someone else can clean up this bit, that would be cool.
Anyway, he spent an hour talking with me and who knows how long beforehand getting setup, on his day off. My rev.1 is now complete rev.2 except the new headband doesn't have a serial number (still got all my old parts, except drivers). I've got 2 yrs left on my warranty, so if another driver doesn't die within a 1.5 yrs, I'll keep these. Something breaks, give it one more RMA and sell them off, been curious about HD800.
