About Paul McGowan
Paul McGowan is the co-founder of PS Audio (The 'P' ) and has been designing, building and enjoying high end audio since 1974. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his four sons: Lon, Sean, Scott and Rob. His hobbies include hiking, skiing, cooking, artisan bread baking. His current big project, other than playing with stereos, is writing a book series called the Carbon Chronicles. Book One, the Lost Chronicle, is a work in progress. You can view his efforts at http://www.paulmcgowan.com
Hi Paul!
I do not want to talk about basics here. If you want to write, then you have to learn to write. If you do not want to pay the baker more than the asking price, then you have to learn arithmetic.
If your education continues, then it is much more of a question of how the subject matter is taught than what the content of the learning material is.
Literature can be taught in a terribly boring way, but it can also be taught in a thrilling way. Mathematics can be a boring learning of formulas, or it can be conveyed excitingly by showing them through interesting scenarios.
If you are lucky enough to be taught by dedicated teachers who love their job and their students, then school and all the education you need is a pleasure.
B.
I’m 100% certain that it’s worth getting a degree-level technical education. It’s a great starting point for getting into high end audio. I can’t imagine designing a complex product, like a Class D amplifier, without a proper understanding control theory, digital signal processing and circuit design.
I listened to Paul again, and I’m going to modify my comments. You need to understand what you’re doing, and that’s going to take some serious study. Many people find the discipline of studying in an organized course the best way of learning. It’s not the only way, and a person with intelligence and determination can learn on the job. The best engineer I know has no degree, but he’s outstandingly clever, and is learning all the time. Another outstanding engineer I know is a doctor of engineering, but he too is learning new stuff every day. I guess that’s the common factor.
Also, I want to say that university is not just about learning “stuff”. It’s about learning to think. That’s the biggest benefit of study.
The field of electronics is ever changing and if you don’t keep up you will be shunted aside. I learned a lot from fellow techs and engineers, anybody who is really good at it is happy to share their knowledge. I used to subscribe to several industry pubs and kept abreast of new developments, I started my education with tubes and when I went out it was integrated everything. By then anybody who really understood discreet circuitry was an asset.
EDN used to have great articles on designing circuits (Pease Porridge anyone?) I learned a lot for them over the years.
Well, as a college educator, I’m sympathetical with Paul’s position. I teach writing and literature, and while I am occasionally blessed to have a student with lots of intrinsic motivation, most of my students regard writing as tedious but necessary. Teaching these to write is like growing tomatoes in the sand. There’s an old joke: “An English major is someone who has nothing to say and can say it beautifully.” But this isn’t true. Because when you have nothing to say, you have no reason to learn how to say anything well. I would prefer that my students start in the messy, haphazard world of having something to say and not knowing how to say it. Because I can teach them that. I can’t teach them to care. I hear Paul saying the same thing: Give them something they want to build. Then help them learn how to build it. And from that seed will grow a deeply-rooted mastery of the profession that will expand to the limits of desire. The educational model he is describing is like the old apprenticeship model. It may not have given rise to a lot of social mobility, but it created wizards of craftsmanship. Maybe there is a compromise position between the alienating educational model we have today and the apprenticeship model we lost with the rise of industrialism. I’m game to explore that idea.
I went to California State Polytechnic. Their approach was “learn by doing.” We had plenty of lab work along with the theory classes. It has surely served me well in my career of mostly working for Hi-End audio companies.
Bascom King
What an interesting way to start my Saturday morning! This larger question is active with me as I think about my kids who are now in their 2nd and 3rd attemps at finding a “career” following years in higher education. I especially thought of my years in medical school when so many of my colleagues muttered regularly about the “useless” details we were asked to master. Until I started internship, I had no idea what I was really committing to in medicine. Now, on the backside of my career, I can say I found myself in a rich and challenging place in which to develop and apply my talents. Up until then, though, all I’d really mastered was how to be a student in the educational system we find ourselves with here. Yes, I can imagine ways in which the entire process could have been different for the better, for me. I can imagine, as well, that the path towards mastery in audio engineering could be shorter than it will turn out for some of our future designers. Yet I can also imagine that there will be those who enter into engineering with one idea and, at some later time and after some bumps in the road, will see an opportunity for themselves that is unique and ultimately necessary for the development of the whole. That is what I continue to hope, at any rate, for audio, for medicine, for ecology, for intercultural relations and astrophysics. There are moments, when listening to music, that I am reminded that such hope for human potential is not just necessary or reasonable, but inevitable.
I’ve told people for years what a massive failure high school is in helping young people decide what they want to do for a profession. The only thing that many of them do know after four years (if they don’t drop out), is that they don’t want anything to do with the classes they had (unless they want to teach). They used to send students to a “Career Fair” where they would talk to some HR rep for a company. That rep knew little, and after 5 minutes, they would hand out a brochure, and move on to the next student. That was supposed to give that teenager a desire to work for them, in that field. They would come back with a bag of brochures, and that’s where they stayed until they threw them out. When I was in college, I took the night classes. One, because I worked during the day, two, the instructors that taught the night classes actually worked as Engineers and they brought a much needed and more interesting perspective to the classroom. This opposed to the daytime instructors that just went directly from an overpriced text book. Computer and Tech curriculum students have an advantage as they get some experience while in school.