I'm always very budget-minded, so it took me a while to get up the courage to get a custom cable for my AKG K271 MK. II's. Surprise - my old video card got sold, and the money went straight towards a new Silver Dragon with no hesitation (I heard many nice things about it around Head-Fi).
I've never been happier - everything sounds crisp, smooth, and effortless. I can hear the most minute details without analyzing what I hear in depth - everything is immediate, detailed, and I just turn off my brain and kick back. Amazingly, Drew has brought these headphones within a hair of my stock K701's. The only difference I can perceive is that the K271's seem to be more sensitive, and the K701's more rich and spaced out (I suppose this is what more experienced listeners call the "sound stage" - I just think it sounds excellent and no beef about it).
I look forward to tomorrow's commute, rattling around underground in a steel box for 40 minutes. Let's see how these headphones cope with no amp (straight-up signal-on-a-diet from my MP3 player), my Icon Mobile, and all the steel-on-steel screeching and grinding that the NYC subway can dish out.
Update on 9-22-09
The new cable worked like a charm - with and without an amp, the Silver Dragon gave them an effortless, clear signature that easily sliced through the background noise (compared with the persistent "muddy/lazy" feeling of the AKG-supplied cable). Crystal highs, easy transitions up and down the spectrum, and not even 40 hours of burn-in on the cable. I can best describe it as the first time I drove a 4WD car - that same visceral thrill of feeling the car tear into the pavement like it's cheap linoleum and the wheels are covered with sandpaper.
Here were my test albums, on a Sony E438 MP3 player and NuForce Icon Mobile amp and bundled interconnect cable (all 320K CBR MP3, encoded with dbPowerAmp LAME 0.97 plugin):
Robert Miles - Dreamland
Boom Boom Satellites - On
Pink Floyd - The Division Bell
Jan Garbarek - Madar
Anouar Brahem - Conte de l'Incroyable Amour
Ghazal - The Rain
Ristorante Paradiso Original Soundtrack (anime)
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - Ella and Louis Sing Gershwin
Vivaldi - The Four Seasons
FLUKE - Risotto
Trance Energy 2009