Well I just finished up getting the gaskets in (I know that seems like an epic long time since the previous post for this job. I took lots of breaks, no sense killing myself on a hot day if nobody's paying me for it) and going for a very light test drive, and the results are f-ing awesome.
Prior to fixing the leak, I thought it sounded pretty damn good, but a little too raspy for my taste in a perfect world, and maybe had a leak to boot. Well, it did have a bad leak, and now it doesn't. The rasp and leak sounding stuff is all gone. The sound volume at low throttle/rpm dropped a bit too, but that's probably a good thing. No more waking up the neighborhood on every cold start.
The sound is insanely great now, imho, and there's no huge raspiness at any RPMs I checked. Specifically, the really ugly one around 2.5-3K rpm is gone. If you've got a similar setup and yours doesn't sound insanely great, maybe you've got a leak too
I think I would have to move this thread to the NSFW area to describe how sexy it sounds.
Anyways, I'm babying it for now to let those gaskets fully bake in. I don't want to go through this leak mess again. I have a highway trip that I'll take real easy tomorrow (visit mom for mother's day), and then re-torque again when I get home. Then I'll start getting on it hard and get a video clip for you guys.