The site innerfidelity.com appears to have been taken down and is now redirecting to stereophile.com. Sad to see the end of an important headphone site built through Tyll Hertsens’s good work. This site transformed the online headphone hobby with Tyll’s reputation for good quality reviews and measurements and sensible, enjoyable commentary. Hopefully some of the content (including measurements) has been saved somewhere and may emerge again someday.
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Yep. Rafe absolutely sucks and has systematically laid to ruin the magnificent mountains of audiophilia that were planted by Tyll.
He was handed a golden key. But instead of opening new doors with it, he had it melted down and reformed as an iron lung.
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Damn that is sad. Joker’s RE-400 review and their subsequent placement on wall of fame helped me decide to purchase those IEMs a few years back and Tyll’s review and placement of the Sundara on the Wall of Fame helped me decide on my purchase of those cans as well. Tyll and the original Headroom website were my initial guide to headphones as I tried to venture out and find better cans than what the local electronics store offered. Heck, I was surprised to call the Headroom customer service line to cancel an amp purchase and have Tyll himself pick up.
It’s sad to see the website is gone. Hopefully it gets republished somewhere else, as the articles by Tyll and others and the Wall of Fame are still great resources.
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One hopes that since everything previously innerfidelity now redirects to Stereophile that the latter site incorporates Tyll’s content in the future. Fingers crossed it’s just a matter of uploading and reorganizing the Stereophile site.
Edit: I’m being optimistic: if they were going to kill off innerfidelity’s old content altogether, why would they redirect to stereophile?
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I hope that the basic info like the measurement interpretation has been kept. Great resource when you’re just starting out or as a refresher. Sad to see it degenerate to this.
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The writing was on the wall when 3 months went by with the same product review on the front page. This was easy to see coming. What a shame.
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It’s basically impossible for anyone new to jump into the shoes of someone like Tyll. Honestly, this website and places like ASR probably ate their niche. Audiophile headphones are not a very large market.
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As a subscriber to Stereophile magazine, I know it’s under new management and have read nothing from them in recent issues about any overtures into the headphone arena. Furthermore, in recent years Stereophile’s coverage of headphones and related equipment has been in a steady decline. So sad to learn of Innerfidelity’s demise–Tyll did such great work there and guided to, as well as away from, several headphone purchases.
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I still have a Maxed Out Home Headroom and HD 580s Tyll steered me towards sitting here on my rack. He never steered me wrong. Bye-bye Inner-fi.
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Remembering Wes Phillips, Tyll, Inner-fi and days gone by: https://www.stereophile.com/headphones/261/index.html
Lift one to that what’s gone.
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I miss the InnerFidelity of the Tyll reign.
The version since … didn’t offer much.
Granted, Tyll was a unique voice in the headphone industry, and probably impossible to replace. Maybe we’ll grow one or two like him in time.
Most of the acorns wanting to grow into oaks are doing video reviews. While those can be enlightening and entertaining, IMO those don’t scale really well. I don’t have time to watch/listen to 10-15 hours of gear reviews a week, and I am not going to free up 10+ hours to do it, week after week.
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It’s all on Wayback Machine as far as I can tell. I just hope they don’t kill the YouTube channel since I’ve no clue if that’s been backed up. Others may be making plans to re-host the headphone measurements at least, and I (as many others I believe) have backups of those same. Haven’t compared notes with anyone else yet but I have 1,004 PDFs at last count; something tells me I might be missing a few— does anyone have another tally?
This prompted me to look into other measurements. So far I guess besides the enthusiasts the closest to a proper replacement appears to be Keith Howard on headphonetestlab.co.uk. I like his stuff more than RTINGS anyway, even if the sample size is a bit limited.
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OK. Thanks for the info. I was hoping someone had the presence of mind to keep this repository accessible. Good for the SBAF group, I lurk a lot there but havent signed up.
Im worried about the YT stuff as well. If nothing else they provide a baseline for reviews.
Not a big fan of RTINGs either, will look at the other site you mentioned, was not aware of it.
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The headphonetestlab site went live 11 May 2020 I believe; I just happened across it earlier today while surfing for alternatives to IF and found measurements that wore a different template from what I was used to.
… Yes I have no life lately and look up random measurements of headphones I have to ratify my own MiniDSP EARS squiggles. So sue me 
I’m hoping Mr. Howard adds more models to his database because while he has some good references there like HD800S (not the original though), all Focal headphones of note, and the LCD-2 & 3, it’s mostly “intriguing” stuff like the Klipsch HP-3, A-T ADX5000, or QUAD ERA-1 on-site. I’m genuinely surprised he doesn’t have classics like the Senn HD6___ for comparison! The site also lacks a proper overlay tool but I just snip and use Photoshop for that sorta thing anyway.
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Maybe if he gets more web traffic he’ll be able to expand his measurement base. Doesnt hurt to put it on forums and see where it goes.
The measurement crew from here are doing a very good job posting and @Resolve has a new standardized rig so its a bonus for the community.
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I doubt this has anything to do with Rafe specifically. It always seemed to me his changes (and take it or leave it attitude to posters) had to do with someone at corporate wanting a site that would appeal to a demographic more attractive to ad dollars.
In other words Tyll didn’t compare headphones to fine wines and luxury cars. He just gave good information and trustworthy advice about headphones.
Tyll chose a good time to retire. Beer and motorcycles are more his style.
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Tyll’s consistency and overall presentation of both measurements and his subjective impressions will be missed. He was truly like the Audio Avatar a bridge between the subjective and objective worlds.
Happy to see his work will be hosted some where else for all of us to still be able to read and enjoy. An happy to see others who are working to continue the work he did.
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Tyll was fun to read and the video’s maybe more so. I stopped visiting that site shortly after Tyll left. Sometime during the last year I took out an internet subscription to Stereophile as I was a die hard follower of J.Gordon Holt (and Harry Pearson and even Peter Aczerl) starting in the 70’s, even accumulated back issues, and followed them until they left this veil of audiophile tears and then the mags started the reviews of gear being beyond the capabilities of my bank account. Getting access to that internet sub to Stereophile was a nightmare, I wasted too many hours trying to download (and those few times when I did manage to the print was hard to read on my 15" PC screen), and finally just threw in the towel. I tried to contact them a few times but never got anything resolved and they thought I was someone by the name of Abby. I don’t even know an Abby. Life’s too short, glad I only sub’d for 1 year and there are lots of websites and forums like this one where user feedback is often more valuable than a pro review.
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Tyll was InnerFidelity. When he left, IF was dead. Right after he announced his retirement, I caught up with him again at RMAF and he showed me around Put (his retirement van). Got to chill with Zach and Tyll, and had a really fun time.
It’s a shame all of the IF data isn’t being made available as some sort of archive by AVTech. It’s a big part of Tyll’s legacy, and having it be gone without so much as an announcement or post on their other sites by AVT is a Fk’ing soulless act.
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