[Ableza]

Looks like someone owes someone a beer or seven. 

 

[Jason Stoddard]

I will happily accept a 6-pack of anything from Oskar Blues. The seventh is on me.

 

[jexby]

  I will happily accept a 6-pack of anything from Oskar Blues. The seventh is on me.

 
Jason,
remind me before RMAF to alert you to about 4 or 20 local Colorado craft breweries/beers that make Oskar Blues seem like budweiser.

 

[Jason Stoddard]

   
Jason,
remind me before RMAF to alert you to about 4 or 20 local Colorado craft breweries/beers that make Oskar Blues seem like budweiser.

Please do!

 

[Armaegis]

I fully expect to see a gear-for-brew barter community develop from this.

 

[cjl]

   
Jason,
remind me before RMAF to alert you to about 4 or 20 local Colorado craft breweries/beers that make Oskar Blues seem like budweiser.

I don't know if I'd go that far - Oskar Blues makes some darn good stuff. That having been said, there are a great many other fantastic breweries in the area too (Avery, Gravity, O'Dell, Rickoli, Crooked Stave, and many, many more...).

 

[jexby]

  I don't know if I'd go that far - Oskar Blues makes some darn good stuff. That having been said, there are a great many other fantastic breweries in the area too (Avery, Gravity, O'Dell, Rickoli, Crooked Stave, and many, many more...).

 
Indeed fantastic options, agree on Gravity, not on Avery (hopheads). others are new to me so thank you.
yet you forgot the best:  12 Degrees !
 
and lest we take this off topic, perhaps we conclude by saying:
 Jason has a lot of "work" to do at RMAF with respect to local beer sampling
and
 maybe there should be a RMAF sub-topic/thread of Colorado Beers somewhere on head-fi to plan/help all the visitors to our state?
 

 

[retrogradiance]

Originally Posted by Jason Stoddard /img/forum/go_quote.gif

 
When I was at Sumo, I thought all this part numbering business was a gigantic pain in the ass that made it impossible for people to know what the hell they were doing. I mean, why call a 121 ohm, 1/4W resistor an 05-1262? Why not call it what it was? Wouldn’t that be a lot easier?
 
Turns out not so much. By thinking “this is a pain, people won’t know what part it is,” I was actually thinking, “I, as an engineer, think this is a pain, because of course I know it’s a 121 ohm, 1/4W resistor, like duh, hell, you can see the stripes on it.”

As an electrical and computer engineering student on the east coast (Worcester Polytechnic Institute if anyone's curiosity lingers) what do they call you guys that work stuff like this in the audio technology/hi-fi industry? From reading your chapters it looks an awful lot like just Electrical and computer engineering. With some manufacturing stuff on the side.
 
I've heard some people call them Audio Engineers, Sound Engineers, Acoustic Engineers but I'm even more confused since I've only found that to be an umbrella term for anything from mixing tracks to designing shells for headphones.
 
I'm curious since a lot of the things that have been mentioned here sound a lot like what I really want to do and I want to market myself better than "I'm just an ECE major who want's to work for some music technology company like Grado Labs/Sennheiser/Schiit/B&O/etc."

 

[jonbmet]

   
Indeed fantastic options, agree on Gravity, not on Avery (hopheads). others are new to me so thank you.
yet you forgot the best:  12 Degrees !
 
and lest we take this off topic, perhaps we conclude by saying:
 Jason has a lot of "work" to do at RMAF with respect to local beer sampling
and
 maybe there should be a RMAF sub-topic/thread of Colorado Beers somewhere on head-fi to plan/help all the visitors to our state?
 

Yeti imperial stout is from CO.  That beer is a journey in and of itself.

 

[jonbmet]

  As an electrical and computer engineering student on the east coast (Worcester Polytechnic Institute if anyone's curiosity lingers) what do they call you guys that work stuff like this audio technology/hi-fi industry? From reading your chapters it looks an awful lot like just Electrical and computer engineering. With some manufacturing stuff on the side.
 
I've heard some people call them Audio Engineers, Sound Engineers, Acoustic Engineers but I'm even more confused since I've only found that to be an umbrella term for anything from mixing tracks to designing shells for headphones.
 
I'm curious since a lot of the things that have been mentioned here sound a lot like what I really want to do and I want to market myself better than "I'm just an ECE major who want's to work for some music technology company like Grado Labs/Sennheiser/Schiit/B&O/etc."

I'd like to see Jason's response to your question, but as an engineer myself, I can tell you titles are complete bullschiit. All that matters is what you can do...the skills you have as an engineer. If you're an engineering guru and can get things done it doesn't matter if you call yourself a "dishwasher" people will come calling for you to work for them.

 

[Ableza]

And I'll add to the excellent reply above that it's not just what CAN you do, but what have you done?

 

[AndreYew]

 
I'd like to see Jason's response to your question, but as an engineer myself, I can tell you titles are complete bullschiit. All that matters is what you can do...the skills you have as an engineer. If you're an engineering guru and can get things done it doesn't matter if you call yourself a "dishwasher" people will come calling for you to work for them.

 
+1 on this, and don't discount manufacturing as "stuff on the side." Designing and engineering to the manufacturing resources available to them is one of the big reasons why Schiit is successful and can do what they do. It's also why Apple is successful, for an example from the other side of the spectrum. Don't be one of those engineers who just tosses their designs over the wall and relies on someone else to make it produceable --- you will never get a great product like that.

 

[retrogradiance]

   
+1 on this, and don't discount manufacturing as "stuff on the side." Designing and engineering to the manufacturing resources available to them is one of the big reasons why Schiit is successful and can do what they do. It's also why Apple is successful, for an example from the other side of the spectrum. Don't be one of those engineers who just tosses their designs over the wall and relies on someone else to make it produceable --- you will never get a great product like that.

I didn't mean to dismiss the manufacturing side of it all. I just took a CAD class a few months ago and I loved it. I see myself one of the few people at my school who isn't just interested in building things that work brilliantly but building pretty things that work brilliantly. I remember when my friend was trying to convert me over to the world of hi-fi a few years ago there were heaps of devices that probably sounded great but I merely dismissed them simply because they looked "ugly" or what not.
 
 
For a lot of products regardless of the industry I noticed that If you're selling direct, your product has to look like it can sell itself. I just switched into being an ECE major just last year, and all I can do so far is really just solder some things together, create some basic op amp circuits on a breadboard, and solve a few basic equations. I think I took a class on digital circuit design and played around with Verilog(which was actually fun) for a bit and then more recently took (and failed) an embedded systems class. Coding is probably my achilles heel and seeing bunches of lines of code that I vaguely understand just make me want to go deeper down the analog rabbit hole. I'm just not exactly sure what skills I should develop.
 

  And I'll add to the excellent reply above that it's not just what CAN you do, but what have you done?

I mean it's not much, but so far all I've done was replace a fuse in my Optonica SM1515 stereo amplifier, and solder some wires back together in my earbuds. I've been more proactively trying to work on soldering a broken part in my iPod Video but there's not much success manifested from that atm.

 

[Ableza]

Getting a degree can be a very important way to learn some basics and the language of the field, but the best way to develop skills in the electronics world is to work with others who know more than you.  Get a job, any job in the industry, do whatever you're asked to do and be patient.  Become an assistant in someone's R&D lab and you will learn more practical skills in a few months than you will in four years of college.  And I say that as a former University professor. 

 

[OddE]

I'd like to see Jason's response to your question, but as an engineer myself, I can tell you titles are complete bullschiit. All that matters is what you can do...the skills you have as an engineer. If you're an engineering guru and can get things done it doesn't matter if you call yourself a "dishwasher" people will come calling for you to work for them.

 
-What the man said. I work as an electrical engineer for a company designing and building subsea handling equipment - think ROVs, submarine cables, offshore oil drilling - that kind of thing. I get to do so much field work I had to get myself a seafarer's book.
 
Not what I had anticipated when I turned in my master's thesis. I majored in RF design and signal processing; until I got my first engineering position, I fully expected to spend my career designing radio modems, broadband power amplifiers and the like. My business card says 'General purpose geek' - which, most days, feels oddly appropriate.
 
As long as you take an interest in what you  do (or, perhaps, in your case, want to do) - you're more than halfway there.
 
Also, I'd suggest you try to find room for some extracurricular activities at least tangentially related to electronics or audio - the first thing we ask potential hires is 'what did you do, besides studying, in university?' - we'd much rather have someone who shows a dedication to his chosen profession and with some tinkering experience than somebody who has spent all his time studying and/or partying.
 
I'd take a guy who has tinkered with something on the side - be it electronics, mechanical engineering, whatever - and a mediocre grade score to go along with it - over one with a perfect score and no experience any day.
 
Obviously, this is not the only way people are hired; there's lots of companies who do not care for anything but your grade average. I do, however, based on personal and friends' experience, fully believe that the companies who do take our approach to what people we hire are more fun to work for than the ones blindly looking at your grades.