Season’s greetings to all, join me for another annual recap, shall you?!

Welcome to my 2025 recap. Yes, it’s that time of year again, no, I can’t believe it, and you’d better believe that Liquid Audio will close for a much-needed break over the festive season! If you have enquiries, best to leave them until we reopen.

Liquid Audio will be closed from 20 December 2025 to 13 January 2026.

Statistics

As I’ve been predicting would have to happen, stats have finally plateaued out, for now at least, after 15 years. 15 damn years! It’s inevitable when you think about it: It’s not possible to continue to grow forever, in a finite space, with finite readers and new businesses popping up all the time. I’m just amazed that we have grown so strongly for so long.

We still have amazing stats, with over 350,000 views from nearly 180,000 visitors in 2025. Plenty of larger businesses would be happy with numbers like these, and I still handle all the backend, design and content, and technical work, of course. My prediction is that stats will flatten out for a while now, stabilising within a few tens of thousands of views, but let’s see.

We are down around 7% in views and visitors from last year. Content likes, however, are up by 186%, which is an epic increase, and subscribers continue to increase, which is great. Honestly, I’ll be happy wherever the numbers settle. I never imagined we’d even get to 100K views a year.

The top-10 most popular articles and FAQs include my Quad 405 review, old vs new CD player FAQ, Sansui AU-101 article, Yamaha NS-1000 article, playing CDs in your BluRay player FAQ, Sansui AU-919 deep dive, Marantz 6300 turntable review, Sansui AU-20000 repair article, AU-317 repair and mini-rant, and Cyrus One amplifier review, in that order. I’ve excluded pages from that top 10, but our contact, home and store pages fall into the top ten in terms of views.

Top 10 Views by country (after Australia) look like this:

Thanks again to all my international viewers, especially those in non-native English-speaking countries! I did have a translation plugin working this year, but pulled it as it chewed too many PHP resources, slowing down my site. I’m not sure how this will affect things, but readers can use the translate function in most browsers.

Changes

As usual, I made numerous website design and content changes for 2025, including new pages and FAQs. I introduced my new On-The-Bench page, showing equipment as I work on it to help keep customers up to date. I also introduced my News page, with news related to me and my system, a Sitemap for people who want to see everything in one place and a Support Us page, which encourages visitors to – you guessed it – support me and my work!

I added 20 new FAQs, such as What Cartridges Have You Owned?, What Amplifiers Have You Owned? and many more. I plan to add more equipment ownership questions and others about the sillier side of hi-fi equipment, bad design decisions, etc. I also added a new recent supporters list, in the sidebar/footer, listing the kind folks who have supported Liquid Audio with a donation. Thanks to all who made donations this year, and previously!

YouTube

My YouTube channel is still slowly growing, and I’m finally getting close to 10,000 subscribers! I’ve largely ignored video content creation due to workload, but I upload a handful of videos a year, so head over there, watch a few, and subscribe if you haven’t already. I released a couple of videos recently that have done really well, the Technics SE-A100 video in particular garnering around 35,000 views in just a few weeks, which is insane for my little channel.

Of around 130 videos, almost all have a 95% or greater positive ratio, too, with most sitting at around 98%, which is extraordinary for YouTube. This is a nearly impossible-to-achieve statistic, especially in my case, because I’m often talking about damage caused by previous repair attempts and those responsible and their friends follow my work and downvote videos. Then there are regular YouTube trolls who downvote everything. And yet, we STILL have an overwhelmingly positive channel rating, thanks to the amazing and intelligent community and vast majority!

Wins

We had several notable wins in 2025. Once again, I wrote more than in previous years, with 62,000 words written across 68 separate items, a substantial novel-sized effort. I know this because my sister is a published author, and I verified those numbers with her! I’m not aware of any other businesses contributing like this, but either way, it’s a significant improvement over last year.

More wins came in the form of the amazing customers and equipment I’ve worked with in 2025. I work with a lot of returning customers, but new ones appear all the time, and I got to work with some great new customers and their equipment this year.

In terms of equipment, given how much turntable work I do, I decided to write a few more turntable articles, and this went down well. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The other focus for me these days is Accuphase, something that has grown steadily since my earliest days owning and repairing Accuphase equipment.

It’s fair to say that Liquid Audio is an independent Accuphase specialist now, and I see a ton of it, perhaps more than any other independent in Australia, everything from the P series amps to the A series premier models, preamps, SACD players, tuners, you name it. You’ll see what I mean in the gallery, below.

I added three of my grail shortwave receivers to my collection in 2025, including a stunning and immaculate JRC NRD-515 that I’ve yet to write about, plus a JRC NRD-525 and a Kenwood R-5000. I also added a new (for me) Subaru Outback 3.6R, which I absolutely love! Tony (Douglas Hi-Fi) – I did pull those sparkplugs, and no, I did not have to raise or lower the engine to do so!!

I also overhauled my B&W Nautilus 803 speakers this year with Jason (the Speaker Doctor), replacing the perished surrounds on the woofers. I also added new and much improved feet, waxed everything, and that’s covered over on my News page. I also purchased a new and NOS arm base for my FR-64S and Luxman PD-350 turntable.

No non-payers this year either! I only have one long-term outstanding invoice now.

Challenges

An ongoing challenge is time and energy management, along with managing the demand for bookings. My booking status table helps, and I’ve now added a how-to-book section to address common booking questions. A waitlist with many dozens of people on it is not sensible for my business, given the consistent and large volume of enquiries, unfortunately. My apologies to anyone who’s missed out on a booking, and to the couple of folks whose equipment I’ve yet to look at/finish.

Another challenge is turnover/volume vs care and attention to detail. Maintaining a high enough volume of regular, smaller work, vs rate of completion of larger, more technically challenging jobs, is a juggle. I’ve also had to pay further attention to minimising the impact of time and energy wasters, intentional or otherwise, something many will understand. I put so much time and effort into my work and this website. Long-term relationships with appreciative, loyal customers are the only ones I’m interested in cultivating.

The dreaded ‘fatigue’ has played a part in my productivity again this year, but this is an ongoing thing for now, and I manage it as best I can. Other than that, we are winning, as Charlie would say. If a handful of people is the only thing we have to worry about with an international audience of nearly 200,000 a year were doing pretty well, I think!

Thank Yous

Thanks as always to the Perth retailers and staff who support my work, refer customers and collaborate. Genuine collaboration and support are invaluable, and a special thanks to my colleagues and friends, Jason @ The Speaker Doctor and John @ JW Electronics, who have each helped out with various things throughout the year. Jason, in particular, is always incredibly supportive, so support his business if you can.

I’d like to acknowledge those who’ve donated equipment to Liquid Audio in 2025. We resurrect vintage hi-fi gear so that others might have an opportunity to enjoy it. Many thanks to the various generous donors in 2025 who’ve supported this endeavour, and to those who’ve purchased equipment I’ve saved. There’s not a lot of margin in most of this work, and plenty of opportunities for me to lose money on equipment that doesn’t sell, as happened this year, but I’m still happy to do it.

Lastly, and most importantly, I’d like to acknowledge and thank my customers, website visitors, advice seekers, donors, subscribers and all who engage my services and support me and what I do. To all who entrusted Liquid Audio with hi-fi equipment, purchased equipment, engaged me for advice, made a donation, bought me a gift, liked and shared content, watched a video, subscribed or left a review, and to everyone who simply made the effort to say thanks for something I did for them: THANK YOU for supporting Liquid Audio!

2025 Equipment Gallery

OK, enough with the pleasantries, welcome once again to the annual equipment gallery. Again, as per 2024, the rules are 1) only one piece of equipment per month, and 2) it must be customer equipment. Let’s go!

Honourable mentions that missed a spot include a lot of Perreaux equipment, including a PMF-5150, PMF-5550, various SM-2 and SM-3 preamps, PMF-1150, 1850, 2150, etc., power amplifiers, a few Thorens decks, including a couple of TD-160s and a ton of others I’ve forgotten. I’d love to triple the size of the gallery, but even this post is 2,600 words and took me long enough to write as it is, so to even get these posts out, I’ve had to cut them back.

My conclusions after looking back over the hundreds of pieces I worked on in 2025 are thus: Lots of Accuphase, amplifiers and turntables. This is not surprising to me, but seeing things again always clarifies my key focuses, and I like these. I have no reason to think 2026 will be any different, and I look forward to it.

Merry Christmas!

Once again, let me take this opportunity to thank you for visiting and supporting my business. Don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement or equipment you’d like to see, and feel free to get in touch after we reopen if you’d like me to look at any of your hi-fi stereo equipment.

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and a fantastic 2026!