It's my 1-week LCD-3 ownership anniversary. I thought I'd mark the occasion with a few impressions, which are brief and preliminary.
First, I love the travel case. It's much more compact than I expected, and it makes the wooden box I had for my LCD-2s seem clunky and useless by comparison.
Second, I expected that the thicker ear pads would lead to a substantial comfort improvement over the LCD-2's that I owned, which were Rev. 1 with the foam headband but the newer earpads. The LCD-2's strong clamping force was one of my primary reasons for selling it. Unfortunately, in my experience so far, the LCD-3 is more uncomfortable than the LCD-2. I feel the extra weight of the leather headband, and the thicker pads seem to press harder upon, and over a greater surface area of, my cheeks and jaw. Whereas I could go at least 20 minutes with the LCD-2 without feeling a headache or a need to take a break, I start to feel cheekbone fatigue and a headache in a shorter time with the LCD-3. I've been stretching the headband by hand, and placing the headphones around the armrest of my couch in the hopes that this will alleviate the clamping force, but I haven't noticed any significant improvement in this regard after a few days.
Finally, a few notes about the sound. I definitely have a general sense that the LCD-3s are more refined in nearly every respect over the LCD-2s (which I don't have on hand to directly compare). But I wouldn't call the improvements dramatic. The LCD-3's imaging seems a little more precise, and the soundstage is slightly more spacious. The treble presence is crisper and more prominent than on my LCD-2s, while the LCD-3's bass impact (especially mid-bass) seems more restrained. The extension and bass quality, however, don't leave much to be desired.
I think the 3's improvements are more evident on well-recorded and mastered music. Conversely, mediocre and poor recordings are much more intolerable on the 3s; problems like a compressed soundstage, harsh treble, and general lack of musical detail are painfully noticeable. But the effortless beauty, detail, and naturalness that the LCD-3 can express on a good recording is impressive.
All of my listening is done either on my Lavry DA10 + Violectric V200 amp, or my CLAS + SR71B (with ALO silver-copper cable or Whiplash TWag v.2). Although I can understand googeli's point that the LCD-3 has much more to exhibit than the CLAS/71B can extract, I still think that combo is very satisfying. I think a lot of people would be happy using it as their primary LCD-3 rig, especially if they had budget limitations and needed some degree of transportability.
So here I am, having sold my LCD-2s (at a substantial loss) and trying to find ways to alleviate the vice-grip of the LCD-3s. For now, I'm satisfied that the LCD-3s provide the sonic improvements I wanted--namely a slightly brighter, detailed, and more spacious presentation. But I can't help but wonder if my source and amp are significantly bottlenecking my experience. The Lavry and V200 are fairly well-regarded in their price range, but I can't avoid the nagging feeling that I haven't heard the LCD-3s at anywhere near their best.
And yet, while I'm tempted by the LCD-3's reputed ability to scale with high-end sources and amps, I'm also concerned about the highly revealing nature of an "end game" LCD-3 setup. I'm trying to upgrade the sound quality of my music collection with the best available masters, but there's simply too much crappily-recorded music out there that is still worth listening to. And so I wonder if a higher-end source/amp combo, like the Audeze Edition, would be too ruthless in revealing the compression and recording weaknesses of the majority of the music I enjoy listening to.
