[BullShifter]

I would say you have an exhaust leak & that will make ANY engine sound shitty. New headers/header will have a smell the first few times the engine is run, after that is should go away, but it doesn't smell like exhaust fumes, it smells more like burnt paint.

other peoples shitty sounding exhaust can be caused from many different things, holes in the exhaust, no muffler, no cat, no resonator, shitty exhaust system, etc. Not too many people drive around with an "open header" if you did that on the street performance & gas mileage would suffer greatly due to no backpressure. The cops would get you pretty quick with an open header, I got busted for an open header on my old bike. By open header I mean a header with nothing or a short pipe(dump) connected to it with no mufflers.

A good muffler shop should be able to fix the leak for cheap, I would think. Thats if the header is not bent or cracked. I know we had a 5.0L mustang at the shop with old ass headers & cracked while putting a new H-pipe on, what a bitch that was to fix.