AMB Laboratories DIY Audio

[TzeYang]

Amb nailed it.

I used to be in Pure Electronics until I realized how little I got out of it especially when it comes to the stuffs I really like (analog for instance). Ask the top students of my year about the B22 and they'll be scratching their heads for a while. I took up a Major (in Multimedia, basically DSP and stuffs like that) and things became much better.

No, the Uni can only get you so far. You cannot deny their contributions though. Uni helps you tremendously when it comes to maths. Maths is very important when it comes to working with analog signals. However, if you're looking to go far in this hobby, self study is the only thing that'll help the most.

[suicidaleggroll]

I have a BS in EE, and can back up what most of the people here are saying. What you learn in school as an EE does touch on analog a bit. In one of the projects in one of my electronics courses we had to design and build a small class A audio amplifier (1/4 watt I believe). I was by far the first one to get it running (I think only about half the class got it running at all), but that's only because of the years I had spent learning the ins and outs of audio on my own as a hobbyist.

High end analog is never covered, most of the course work is applied math (DE, PDE, Laplace, Z-transforms, Fourier and how it relates to filtering, etc) analog circuit design (not audio), and digital. The vast majority of your time will be spent doing math, programming, and analyzing and breaking down power supply circuits.

It's not a bad field to get into if you enjoy audio though, the stuff you learn will go a LONG way when you start working with DIY projects, but it won't get you to the point where you can design your own high end amplifiers.

Personally, I now work for a small research organization that deals primarily with atmospheric physics. Recently I've been working a lot with L3, SRI, SSI, Utah State, and others to develop UV photometers for satellites. It's about as far away from audio as you can get while still dealing with hardware. It's almost entirely programming, but I enjoy programming (especially embedded work), so it's fine for me. This is generally the type of thing EEs end up doing after graduation. If you enjoy programming, that will get you a long way. I was always the guy sitting in the back of the high school classes programming games on my TI calculator.