Seeing a burn in regimen brought up in that review, along with the typical "it completely changed for the better" progression I've seen countless hard line subjectivists describe in excruciating detail, made me realize something about Tyll's IF: from reading him for so long, I know that he came down on the subjective side of the debate on things like burn in, whether backend equipment has any effect on the sound, and cables, and yet can anybody remember him making a big thing of it in a review?
I certainly can't; on the contrary, Tyll focused his commentary on the headphone, he only occasionally mentioned different sources (and didn't go into paragraphs about how completely different each one supposedly made the headphone sound), and if he had a burn in regimen, he kept it to himself and only commented on what the headphone sounded like presumably afterward.
In other words, he adeptly avoided bringing up any of the circular debates in the hobby, meaning that regardless of whether the reader was an objectivist, subjectivist, something in between or hadn't decided yet; they could read Tyll without feeling like they were being subtly pushed toward one camp or the other in one of those debates, or that Tyll was clearly on the opposite side of the tracks from them.
Without being able to quite pinpoint this aspect of Tyll's output before now, it's probably the biggest thing I was worried about losing now that Tyll is gone, and it seems that my very worst fears have been confirmed. If I were trying to write a cruel caricature of a typical full-on subjectivist audio review, I would have come up with something very much like the XC review.
I want to stress that nothing I'm saying is rooted in any personal beef with Rafe. It's his show over at IF now, I guess.
But this style of review, light on substance and rife with subjectivist notions that frankly I don't believe in, is of very little use to me. When I read Tyll, I had a pretty good sense of how what he was reviewing might sound, and the more experience I personally gained with headphones he had reviewed, the better I was able to parse his impressions. Reading the most recent IF review, I haven't got a clue what that headphone is supposed to sound like, and he could review a hundred headphones in that manner and I could listen to every one of them and I wouldn't be able to parse anything further from the hundredth review than the first.
To be blunt, this is not a style or personality thing. This is a "getting your point across" thing.