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ARE YOU THINKING about continuing your education because you are interested in a career in the field of audio design? Do you know what audio design really means? It's not recording music in a studio, mixing down a multi-track master tape at a console, or setting up a sound system for a band. These are technicians' jobs. Although they may be fun, they don't require any real knowledge of design. Engineers are the ones who design equipment, while technicians set up, install, operate, calibrate and repair it. Getting Ready How can you prepare for a career in audio design? First, you should decide to go to college. You should major in electrical engineering as a first choice or physics as a second. If you decide on electrical engineering be sure to choose a full four-year program in electrical engineering, not one in electrical engineering technology. The curriculum should be accredited by the ABET, an agency sponsored by electrical engineering professional societies. If you will be majoring in electrical engineering, try to invest in a computer before going off to school. You don't need to have the latest and fastest (an IBM clone is a good choice if you're concerned about the cost). Your computer should have at least 640K of memory, enhanced graphics capability, a 20 Meg hard drive, one floppy drive, a math co-processor and a mouse. You can complete the package with an in expensive dot matrix printer. For soft ware, you will need a word processing program (preferably one that allows you to do technical equations) and a drawing program (I recommend the student version of Autosketch). A good circuit analysis program, such as the student version of PSPICE, will also be valuable. This is a very powerful program which you will use often during your years in school. If you can't afford the computer, you'll need to find the computer labs at your school when you arrive and learn to use the machines there. The disadvantage of this is that computer labs often have long waiting lines when you need to use them the most. A computer in your dorm room eliminates this problem. Choosing Your Courses When you get to school, what courses should you take? For the first two or three years, you will probably find that you don't have much of a choice be cause you will be busy taking required courses. By the time you become a junior or senior, though, you can begin to take your elective courses. This is when you can start to specialize. With an interest in audio, you should take at least a one-quarter course in fundamental acoustics. If an acoustics course is not taught in electrical engineering, you will probably find one in physics or mechanical engineering. If you can find courses in electroacoustics, architectural acoustics, and musical acoustics on campus, by all means take them also. It should be easy to fit these courses into your program as electives. Electrical engineering has many specialty tracks in which you can fulfill your elective requirements. Bear in mind it's important for you to know the fundamentals of both the analog and the digital side of things. On the analog side, courses in transistor circuit design, operational amplifier circuit design, active filter design, and power electronics are good choices. Because audio electronics is found in all communications receivers and transmitters, I recommend a course in communications theory and circuits. If at all possible, try to take a course in electro magnetic compatibility covering the important area of interference control in equipment as well. A feedback control theory course is also a good choice because almost all audio circuits involve feedback. Most controls courses will teach the fundamentals of both analog and sampled-data or digital control systems. On the digital side, a course in digital signal processing that includes the mathematical techniques used to process sampled-data signals will be valuable. The very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits which are the heart of real-time digital signal processing hard ware must be programmed to perform any task, so be sure not to overlook a course in the programming language for these circuits. Courses which cover the fundamentals of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion are also important. You will probably get enough digital logic courses in the required curriculum, but if you like these courses, you can take more as electives. What ever you decide to take, try not to over specialize in any one area. You should make it your goal to obtain an education that covers a broad base rather than a narrow specialization. Read! The school you choose should have a good technical library. There you will find professional journals and consumer magazines relating to the audio field which get back as far as the 1920s or 1930s. To successfully use the library, you must know how to use the card or computer catalog. If you don't know how to use these, don't be too proud or embarrassed to ask someone at the reference desk for help. Anyone who is seriously interested in audio will regularly spend time in the library going over old journals and magazines. Some of those I recommend are the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, pre-1972 Transactions of the IEEE Group on Audio and Electroacoustics, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Audio (formerly Radio), Audio Amateur, Speaker Builder, Wireless World, (now Electronics World & Wire less World Radio Electronics), and pre 1982 Popular Electronics. You will be amazed at the things you can learn by reading old journal and magazine articles. You might find out that the electrostatic loudspeaker is not new but was patented in the 1920s, that H.H. Scott described a vacuum tube noise reduction system for 78 rpm records in the 1940s and that almost all vacuum tube amplifiers were function ally identical to the Williamson amplifier first described around 1947. Here's a tip: Make photocopies of the ones which interest you the most and keep them for future reference. As a minimum, you should keep a notebook in which you make notes on the papers and articles you read. Someday you might want to use the material for reference purposes, so you should record the name of each journal and its volume number, page numbers and date. In addition, you should always look at the list of references at the end of articles and papers. They are rich sources of related papers that you also may wish to read. Get Published! Most schools have a senior project requirement or give academic credit for special project courses. You should use this opportunity to tackle some project related to audio. For example, you might want to design and build a power amplifier, a loudspeaker system, a graphics equalizer or a real-time spectrum analyzer. Whatever you choose, you should thoroughly research the project in the literature so that you can reference all design procedures, equations and so forth that you do not directly create. When you finish your project, write it up and try to have it published in a con sumer, semi-professional or do-it yourself audio publication such as Audio Amateur. The editors of these magazines are always looking for good authors, and, as you probably know, one of the best things you can list on your resume when you go looking for a job is a published article. Plus, what better way is there to get that seed money for your next project! Post-Graduate Success Toward the end of your college career, you will begin to think about going to graduate school or getting a job. If you decide to go to graduate school, it will be 'more of the same,” but on a more advanced level. In just one or two years of graduate school, you will mature a lot and the many things that you learned so quickly in your undergraduate days will begin to make more sense. In addition, you'll have time to better organize your search for a job. When it comes time to look for a job, go to the placement center at your school for guidance. There you can get help in preparing a resume and learn how to act when you go for a job inter view. You will probably find that few if any audio companies come to schools to hire new graduates. Therefore, it will be up to you to contact firms to inquire about openings. Trade and professional journals are good sources of job announcements. For example, companies regularly advertise job openings in the JAES. If you don't see advertisements for openings in companies for which you would like to work, find their addresses and send them a copy of your resume along with a cover letter. Keep in mind that your resume should contain a description of all the experience you have had in the audio field, so be sure to include some evidence that you have done something worthwhile. If you are proud of the report you wrote on your senior project, include a copy with your resume. Even better would be a copy of anything you have had published. “Talking the Trade” I once had a student who sent out about two hundred copies of his resume to US and foreign companies in his effort to land job in the audio business. For his senior project, this student had designed and constructed a 400W stereo amplifier. It looked like no one was hiring at the time and he was getting pretty discouraged, but he finally succeeded in getting a job with a prestigious old-line loudspeaker company. Another former student decided to look for an audio related job after he had been out of school for two years. He was turned down by a loudspeaker manufacturer (he was told) because he had not been building and testing loudspeakers as a hobby. If this student had been better prepared to “talk the trade” and had demonstrated that he had done some in dependent projects, he would have got ten the job. Therefore, I always recommend that students do something, write it up, publish it and show it off if they are serious about preparing themselves for a job in the audio field. I sincerely hope that in some way the pointers in this article will lead you to success in your quest for a career in audio design. With careful planning and a lot of hard work, your future in this exciting field can be assured. Good luck! ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. W. Marshall Leach, Jr., is a professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches courses in applied electromagnetics and electronic design. He is a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society and a senior member of the IEEE. NOTES 1. The Williamson Amplifier ($6.70 including shipping) is available from Old Colony Sound Lab, PO Box 243, Peterborough, NH 03458; (603) 924-6371, FAX: (603) 924-9467. 2. For a copy of Audio Amateur's “Writer's Guidelines' (applicable for almost any publication), forward a letter-size SASE to Audio Amateur Publications, PO Box 576, Peter borough, NH 03458, Attn: Guidelines. ++++++++++++++++ Also see: |
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