More Audio Potpourri: What's the best sample rate converter? The other father of MP3 (James D. Johnston "JJ"). Are measurements important? And TAS' "objective" confusion.

For this post, let's discuss a few other audiophile items that have come my way in recent weeks.

First, let's talk about something I haven't brought up for awhile now: sample rate conversion (SRC).

A few weeks ago, Spoon (a.k.a. Steven Elkins of Illustrate) sent me an E-mail about his new src.hydrogenaudio.org page evaluating and ranking the qualities of various software sample rate converters. I believe the page has been online since late 2025. Check out the forum discussion about the project as well.

Audiophile Potpourri: December 2025 web traffic among audio sites, price of cables poll, and flashback 2014 while looking ahead.

Let's have some fun this week on miscellaneous topics.

Occasionally, I'll highlight items I've either written or found on audio discussion forums I think would be good to share. One reason I decided to start doing a blog beyond just contributing to forum discussions was precisely because while the public forums are great for interactions with community members, meaningful posts often become obscured behind pages and pages of chit chat, irrelevant responses, and sometimes unpleasant arguments.

[I've unfortunately witnessed situations where very meaningful threads are closed off prematurely based on the bias of moderators. Even worse, threads with useful discussions might be erased entirely from existence which I feel is an slap in the face of well-meaning participants who put their time and efforts into thoughtful reflections. This is nothing new in the audiophile world; for example last year Stereophile scrubbed their website of all public comments accumulated over decades!

While I acknowledge the right of a website's owner to do such things, that doesn't make it any more palatable. I certainly understand the need for moderation in removing nonsensical, trollish, unethical, or crude statements that add nothing to promote thoughtful discussions.]

Speaking of forums and websites, I thought here in early 2026 it would be fun to explore website traffic numbers of some of the most common audiophile/audio sites using a common metric. One can get monthly visit numbers from Similarweb for free, a well-known website traffic tracker.

As It Is. - Guest post by T.S. Gnu.

"His Master's Voice" - Francis Barraud, 1898
(2025 color remastered.)
Original Nipper with Edison cylinder phonograph.

The Journey

We live at a time in history that many consider to be unique. However, this can be said by anyone at any point in history, and not for the multitude of reasons they believe it to be so, but rather due to the unassailable fact that it just happens to be to the only period in time that they happen to be alive. That is... just the way things are. While it may be entertaining for people to write (or read) about something "As We See It" or even "As We Hear It" along with all the pitfalls that come with those points of view, reality only cares about, and I'm anthropomorphizing here, what is — reality doesn't care about how we see it. This phrasing is also testament to how we are ill-equipped (post-modernists more so than others 🙄) to deal with the fact that the Universe is — it simply exists. The Universe is. It is cold (ca. 2.7K). It is indomitable. And it is uncaring of what we see, what we want… even what we are. 

With that foremost in mind, this missive aims to outline what is as far as our little hobby goes, along with a view of the sauntering journey (with a little ambling off the path) to what we discovered when we arrived here, here being the present time. What is presented here is factual information about past events that is verifiable, and with the odd scientific principles that have been verified by mathematical proofs; in addition there will be the odd opinion, which will be clarified to be as such. Readers are free to disagree with the latter and I encourage active engagement on the same.