I'll have a little surprise about the new LCD3, but not before I beat a dead horse to death.
Best, good, POS, or whatever depends upon the person. One approach to these things is to explain one's personal preferences and go from there. I will make a short story long, and hopefully this will give people an idea where Anax, Sachu, me, a few others maybe, are coming from in terms of the Leben. Many years ago, in the 1990s, I was in the market for a DAC / CD-Player. There used to be more Hi-Fi shops back then because the Internet was just in its infancy. I actually used an early version of the Mozilla web browser, and the World Wide Web, as it was known back then, was an extremely boring place. There was no porn, there was no shopping, it just consisted of cheesy HTML pages on various academic subjects.
So anyways, I auditioned lots of gear at this store in Michigan which included some well known names such as Linn, Rega, Classe, CAL, etc. Of course the holy grail back then was to find a DAC or CD Player that sounded more like vinyl - since vinyl wasn't
that far removed from the world back then. I went through a couple of DACs and CD Players, and I did mention to the salesperson, that I wished digital could have the resolution and smoothness of turntables. The sales guy said, "well you might want to try this." He brought out some California Audio Labs DAC that had a tube circuit it in. I listened to it, and upon the first note, I thought was "What! This is not analog, this is muddy mid-bass bloated warm gooey crap that imitates the worst of vinyl and carries over the few of the advantages of digital such as clarity and control." This in a nutshell is how I heard the Leben. Maybe it isn't that bad. It's a matter of preference. To me, it is
that bad. This kind of sound ellicits a very strong response from me. To this day it makes me very very angry - like Bruce Banner turning in the hulk angry. Your opinion may be diametrically opposite from mine, and that's OK.
So my perceptions of the Leben exactly mirror those of Anax's, in the succinct terms that he put them in. In terms of Sachu's "distortion" comment, I assume that he is referring to the muddiness, a sign of high amounts of distortion, or lack of control of the LCD3 driver which results in loose bass and shouty mids. The Leben literally goes "blub blub blub, blub blub blub, blub blub" with the LCD3 and even the HD800. I can totally see why people would like the HD800 matched with the Leben, but to me, why take so much away from HD800s strengths just to cover its weaknesses and try turn in into something that it's not supposed to be in the first place? Better off with the baseline Bottlehead Crack, unless you drive speakers too, are simply curious, or want bragging rights because this amp ain't cheap.
So hopefully this will give readers a better understanding about this amp than what current exists on HF (top 10 lists, simplistic qualifiers, reviews lacking criticism, etc.) It's tough trying to explain things in words. Finally, these impressions were of the headphone out - which probably sounds very different from the speaker out. It's my understanding, based on the 6 Moons review, that the headphone out is tapped from the speaker out. I don't know if this is true or not. If it's true, I would be curious about the circuit from the speaker out to headphone out, i.e. what the headphone output Z is. That itself could explain a lot of things.
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And as for the little surprise, I would like to confirm with those who have received their new un-veiled LCD3s:
The thin felt disc behind the cage was replaced with a ~2mm foam:
Maybe Audeze took a page from the TP mod.
I posted a number of times that it seemed like the old foam was really suffocating the sound and making them sound more like a closed headphone. It might not have as perfect a square wave now, but I bet it sounds way better. I'll probably lug over the dynahi to the LA meet so I can get an idea of the sound in my own rig. 
