Growing up poor in Bucharpest, life often felt like this:
 
 
 
Then I got a wife and a job.  Now I am like this:
 
 
 
So now I was flush with cash and had nothing to spend it on.  Then I heard about the LCD-2.  The more I kept reading, the more excited I got.
 

 
And then I ordered.  And waited:
 
 
Then one day, a package came:
 
 
And I was like:
 
Then it was time for the unboxing:
 
 
Then came the listening. At first I was like:
 

 
Probably because of burn in or something.  But after 30 seconds the beat dropped, and it was like:
 
It was kind of weird when it was just me, but when I showed it to my wife and friends we were all:
 
Needless to say, when I first heard about burn in I was like:
 
But now I firmly believe:
 
 
Then I started surfing the forums looking for more great gear:
 
 
My friends and I would rock out with our headphones every night:
 
Long after they had all gone home, I was still burning the midnight oil, listening to my jams:
 
 
It was like Wall Street during the coke years.  I'd stay up all night and then go to work and put in my 60.  I thought my performance hadn't slipped at all.  But my bosses were like:

Then I went a step further and started getting all my audiophile packages at work:
 
My boss waited until a new one came and had it sent to his office. I had to go there to pick it up. When I came in, he was like:
 
After he fired me, I came home. My wife was not understanding, she dumped me:
 
I thought she was bluffing, so I gave her some time:
 
But she sent divorce papers over. Then I had to hire a lawyer. He talked a lot about how she wouldn't get a dime, so I was like:

I even sold the Audeze to pay for legal bills and as a result lost all my new friends. The little money the lawyer didn't take went to my ex, as she left court with the last of my cash she did a little dance on the ashes of our marriage:
 
Now I am poor and alone in Bucharpest again:
 
Screw you Audeze.

Everyone has "that" song.  The song that helped define their life, that they could easily divide their life in half without batting an eye - before the song and after the song.  The song itself might not even be particularly memorable - it could have just been playing during a life-altering moment and be inextricably linked to it in one's mind for eternity.  It could signify a coming of age or a midlife crisis.  A person could be doing anything - performing heart surgery or diffusing a bomb - and when that song comes on nothing else exists but the song and maybe an air guitar that spontaneously generated in their hands.
This is something really unique to music.  While you may have an art afficionado or literature buff here and there similarly affected by a particular painting or limerick, music - while it affects everyone differently, has a certain universal appeal that is truly unique.  I always thought this phenomenon was limited to the source material - give me the song and its my jam, whether I hear it on a pair of laptop speakers or a Marshall stack.  But then I came across something truly extraordinary - a device for musical playback that could make every song - well, "that" song.
 
Philosiphy
 
$2.  It sure is a lot of money as a child, when candy is the only currency that matters and money can get it.  For adults, not so much.  It can hardly buy a cup of coffee.  Yet for $2 (shipped, via Amazon Prime) you can have a box of awesome delivered to your door.  
 
The Coby CVH47 may not look like much.  Its form-after-function utilitarian styling leaves one wanting in today's age of flash-in-the-pan glitz-and-glamour razzmatazz showboating artsy-fartsy namby-pamby luxury gear.  Lightweight plastic and gently curved metal was once all a man could ask for in a generation of understated elegance.  Nowadays if it isn't bedazzled with Swarovski crystals and swaddled in velvet it is not worth coveting.  The Coby's truly herald from a different age, a time where you got by with hard work, sweat and tears.  Ever since Abraham Lincoln put a stop to all that, this is a value that has been lost to subsequent generations.  Coby hearkens back to a lost chapter in our history when things weren't so darn complicated.  Remotes didn't have so many buttons because you had to walk up to the TV and there were only 4 channels, and there was no cereal "aisle" with hundreds of cartoon animals peddling fluorescent glow-in-the-dark sugar cubes to kids because milk hadn't been invented yet.  Coby looks back at this time wistfully and says "what would their headphone sound like?"  If this time makes you wistful and nostalgic, grow up - emotions are meant to be bottled up.  But these headphones may be right for you.  Think about a time without synonyms-  because there was only one word for everything.  A time of simplicity - when everything could be cured with an aspirin and a stiff one - including ED.  Shouldn't your headphones too?
 
Technolgic
 
Coby's CVH47 work scientifically.  From fully coated dynamic drivers to sound waves that propagate and form "audio", these are state-of-the-art.  If Thomas Edison had known just what he was foreshadowing when he invented the light bulb, he probably would have invented the CVH47 instead.  I wrote Coby quite a few times and have never heard anything back, so I suppose frequency response is never.  Distortion is well below the threshold of information I'm capable of finding through the internet.  But enough of the numbers - how does it sound?
 

Graph.  Flat! Extension.
 
Soundings
 
There are few sounds that have ever graced my ears - a newborn kitten sneezing, a muted bell sounding on a light tower over the rise of a tempestuous sea lapping up against beleaguered banks - that ever really stick with you, that encapsulate those little things in life that happen then are gone and yet remain.  With the Coby CVH47, every note echoes in your subconscious long after its superb decay has faded out.  The devlish rhythms serrate your soul and shock your senses like the scent of rain on long-barren earth.  Who can resist the wiles of such a headphone?  It is as the unlisted instrument in every piece it plays.  It is the fifth Beatle and the third Simon and Garfunkel.  It does not impart its own signature on the music that passes through it yet the imprint it leaves is indelible.  It is subtle as a witty turn-of-phrase and bombastic as a punk rock anthem.  It is the big bang and water trickling over rocks, a shout and and echo, a sigh and a triumphant rebel yell.  It obliterates all in its path while leaving them untouched.  In short - it is everything and it is nothing, an antilogy wrapped in an allegory couched in a simile.  It gets so wrapped up with one's emotional being that they are stricken with acute alexithymia, and any halfhearted attempt at description degrades it.  While listening to the CVH47 I was sometimes so overcome that I had to retire to my outdoor Japanese rock garden to contemplate life while I brushed my ponytail and whispered to myself.  That it had this effect is truly astonishing, as I live in a high rise and am bald.
 
Into the Sunset
 
So where does Coby go from here?  How does one improve on what amounts to perfection?  Coby CEO Young Dong has a few ideas.  "For one, we need to do kickstarter.  Another area of improvement is DSD.  HRTF.  Sean Olive."  Coby must also play the "lifestyle" card if it wants to compete with the likes of Beats and Mr Speakers.  A high-profile posthumous endorsement deal with Michael Jackson is imminent if the rumours are to be believed.  Respected producers like Phil Spector are also starting to sing the CVH47's praises.
 
In light of the impeccable performance and unseemly value of this product, I feel behooved to bestow upon it an award of such rarity that it has never before been given.  I speak of course, about the "double rainbow during a solar eclipse" award.  The Coby CVH47 has earned a vaunted spot in the pantheon of hi-fi, and will not be displaced until the fact that I must write regular articles that portray this hobby as moving ever forward lest I lose my precarious niche journalism job forces my hand.  
 

 
Financial/moral Considerations - I stole the $2 to buy these headphones from a blind homeless man
Rig - Sansa Clip -> Coby CVH47

Schiit Magni Review
 
-please contact me for a one millimeter version of this review downloadable onto a microdot that can be smuggled and hidden from even the most prying eyes.
 
Intro:
 
As a free-thinking maverick who bucks trends and rides bulls, I have really never been one of the multitude of Schiit fans.  Ever since the first Asgard was hyped to high heaven, I've been averse to their products and never impressed with their offerings.  That said, I decided to try their newer product, their cheapest to date, to see if its stripped-down bare-bones nature would somehow change my roguishly independent mind.
 
About Schiit: Schiit Audio may be grounded in solid engineering, founded by a disciple of Ampzilla's James Bon Jovi and a Thetan, but don't let that fool you: in front of the scenes is gimmicky marketing and infantile humour.  
 
Source:
 
Running Springs Power Conditioner -> Esoteric K-01 -> Magni
 
Test Tracks:
 
Yakkety Sax (Quad Rate DSD) - On Repeat for Six Weeks
 
Value:
 
The Magni is a whole lot of amp for $99.  That said, this weekend I went to the Dollar Store with a nephew (not my nephew, he was just this kid who has an uncle,) and made it rain.  I initially tried to offer them fifteen cents for some of their products but they said that I was nickle-and-diming them.  When I finally walked out of there, I had more stuff than I could shake a stick at and my fingers stuck in a chinese finger trap.  I didn't think it would work on me as I wasn't Chinese but I guess it was an international version.  This is all to say that there's a whole lot $99 can buy, so one amp's perceived "value" is kind of lame in that light.  Sure, it's made in America, but so is a lot of crap like synthetic viruses and Green Day.  
 
Sound Quality:
 
First Impressions:
 
As a lone wolf who has veered off the beaten path and taken the one less cliched, I knew that there was no way my skepticality on value was going to affect my perception of sound quality.  Just like I didn't let race affect my thoughts on Hillary Clinton.  Upon receiving my Magni I promptly hooked it up to my Esoteric transport which I have reviewed extensively (see my review index) to see if it was up to snuff.  I eschewed my Nordost Frey cabling for some Redco wire and sat down on my exercise ball to spin some tunes.  My AKG K1000's never sounded so bad.  Headphones that should sound expansive sounded closed in.  Instead of lively sound all I got was a plodding mess that trudged along as if weighed down by a ring of power that knew it was nearing it's doom.  
 
The Red Wedding:
 
It was at this point that I decided to use the Freys to see if they could serve as a proper bridge between my source and my amp.  Suddenly everything was glorious.  The highs tinkled.  The lows gravelled.  Then the Freys "malfunctioned" and blew up my 25K source.  I have a feeling this was out of spite that I spurned them.  I hope Nordost gets their comeuppance.  Still, before the total meltdown, the Magni acquitted itself fairly well.
 
Technical jargon for us engineers:
 
As a social engineer working in a demanding industry, I know how tough it can be to pair good engineering with a price that is right.  Here is what I'd like to have seen from the Magni:
 

1. To my ear, the left ear always seemed softer while the right ear always seemed louder and more suicidal.  This suggests an imbalance, and the only way I can see around it is an Alps RK50.  
2. The chassis on my class D speaker amp is cool and puts out 500 watts.  Yet this amp puts out a measly watt and gets uncomfortably warm after I keep my hand on it for a few minutes.  This can be rectified by using massive internal heatsinks (external would ruin the looks.) The footprint may now resemble a Yeti, but at least I know these egregious heat errors are fixed.
3. Wall-wart.  If I wanted one I would have spent 10 times the price on a Meridian Prime.  I want an external linear power supply in a matching box.  And it needs more caps than a political comment on a yahoo.com news article.
4. Speaker taps.  This amp needs them so I can plug my HE-6 in and experience epiphany.  Pursuant to that it needs a resistance network to fix impudence issues.  
5. Cloud.  This needs to connect to it.  I don't care how.  

 
Conclusatory Remarks:
 
The Magni is a little entry level amp with a lot of potential.  It just needs to be bigger and end-game.  I've sent Jason a full list of cool things available for $99 (a glowing review from me for example) and he has agreed that the Magni's value was possibly overstated.  I applaud Jason for his use of marketing but as he knows I am a dissident who won't be drowned out by the yes-men and lemmings who insist $99 for an amp that can drive 80% of the headphone market to ear-piercing levels is a good deal.
 
As always, thanks to Jason and co for the loaner unit that I command as an in-demand reviewer.