This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below To do my job regardless, on headfi I'll keep it terse because that's literally the speaker posts plus two resistors. Ultra-low output Ω, no noise and what for the occasion are quadrillions of watts add to mondo drive. That means gold medals for bass and general shove, density and weight. Think big! Any remix which overlays originally acoustic tracks on a club or ambient infrasonic groove will milk from your cans the absolute maximum bass juice. No Stello or Eximus LF boost required. In certain circles it's already well-known how hooking up cans to amplifier speaker terminals will finally tell the whole story. The Aura might simply be first to do that with ICEpower. On paper it could read overkill. Or worse, all brawn with zero finesse. Cue up "Ambient Oud" from Omar Bashir's The Crazy Oud. "Something There (Remix)" from Complex Stories, Simple Sounds. Martin Tillman's electric cello on Eastern Twin's "Trans Mojave". Or any depth-grooving Mercan Dede cut for that matter. You no longer think overkill. Yes a Bakoon or Questyle will give it to you more crystallized and teased out but I guarantee that you'll enjoy the longer sessions with the V2 and feel like a proper meat 'n' potatoes guy or gal while at it. This isn't about maximizing zing on uptight strings, sizzle on sibilants or the high-relief outline edging so popular today. It's not about soft focus, cappuccino-froth airiness or grid-type sorting either. It's a bottom-up sound dominated by very substantial hard yet not dried-out bass that's locomotive, propulsive and vigorous. In Photoshop terms it's exactly like moving the central Level slider left, away from white and toward black. It does soften contrast a bit but burnishes tone color to be as far from ghostlike as possible. Even Paula Morelenbaum's naturally lightweight bossa nova shifts gear into more profundity. Synth brasses and piano lose some of their leanness and get beefier. In the best sense of the word it's a bit of a porcine ride. Meatloaf not Enja. This came off best with natively predisposed headphones like the Alpha Dog and Audeze LCD-2. Whilst ICEpower drive did exactly the same thing for Sennheiser's hi-Ω HD800, knowing what a Crayon gets from them had me think they gave up too much of their effervescent airiness to turn too ordinary. They were nearly unrecognizably ballsy but no longer sophisticated. My very best headfi mate was the more inefficient Alpha Dog. This sounded like far more than its $600. From the above you'll have figured that 320kbps compression (what the '+' in Spotify buys you over lossier bit rates) very much benefited from this treatment. It's the antidote to lean Internet radio, YouTube and various lossy streaming services. If the Aura Note Version 2 is to be ambassador to omnivorous music consumers who do it with anything—thus not to those who are unduly obsessed with hifi effects—it speaks with a very loud and convincing voice indeed. Perusing the remote control's buttonry, I chanced over rand. Figuring it short for 'random', I pressed whilst a memory card dutifully followed its TOC's sequence of alphabetical track numbers. Now I was in what Apple calls shuffle mode. Neat. That was just what the doctor ordered to become the unpredictable soundtrack to working behind a monitor screen. Now it matters naught how your OS decides to write a playlist or haphazard albums dump to card or USB stick. To dictate playback precisely you could of course use prog to design your dream sequence. It'll simply involve loads of button fumbling to be best left to rare occasions. Random is just one button and so much easier. Whilst on nice, being able to completely defeat the display is too. The endless ticker tape accompanying playback from USB stick/card otherwise gets distracting fast. And because this is highly efficient class D, the Aura Note can run 24/7 and stay as cool as a cucumber. For a decidedly hot note and to wrap up my headfi coverage, Fang Bian's infamous HifiMan HE-6 + V2 equalled bona fide rave levels with perfect control. Numerous ¼" jacks can play these inefficient planars loud enough. All that takes is sufficient voltage gain. Few though have the necessary drive to truly master them. The V2 contributes cojones and low-down reinforcement, the magnetostat adds treble life and fluidity. The Aura Note and HE-6 made for an absolutely unconditional love fest. At 55 on the dial I was in full-immersion SPL. With another 45 clicks before maxing out, even the hardiest of bangers could achieve certain deafness in no time. Who woulda thunk that an integrated headfi jack on a CD/USB receiver rather than posh standalone unit would be the perfect HE-6 destination? Once you factor in ICEpower, it made perfect sense. Until I tried, it remained frosty theory though. And reality was far better than I could have predicted or wished for. From my veteran desktopper's perspective—that came with this writing gig—the Aura Note V2 was the ultimate box for the job. It's compact, handsome and powerful into both speakers and cans, shockingly so for the latter. It's a multi-tasker sans pareil. It does everything and then some, like supporting my strange proclivity for turning gear into screen stands. The footer of my HP2710 perfectly spanned the gap across the CD well. Parked atop short footers to the far left of the deck, this left just the right amount of space to slide open the glass lid and remove the disc puck. That particular trick likely won't matter to anyone else. It simply hit my geek button just so. Compared to my half-priced Wyred4Sound mINT—another compact ICEpower integrated—the Aura's headfi chops were rather more serious. As has been leitmotif all along, Simon's voicing was weightier, calmer and bigger; EJ's crisper, quicker and slightly cooler. One went deeper into macrodynamics and scale, the other into microdynamics and inner detail. Both were ideal compadres for Gallo's TR-3D subwoofer since with them one applies class D top to bottom for continuous high damping without any textural breaks. Compared to my Gato DIA-250, the V2's top end was noticeably more open and worked out. Anthony Gallo's CDTIII tweeters glommed on to that with appreciation. Compared to Funjoe's Clones Audio threesome the Aura was mellower and more relaxed, generous and robust. Functionally there was no competition. Time to duplicate Simon's CES stunt with my biggest baddest speakers.