Two answers:

1) Teams. Designing a product is rarely a one-man effort; build a group
which covers the skills and experience you need.

2) Time. Both to learn the skills -- and yes, it is a commitment; this
is a career you're talking about, not a job -- and to iterate over a
design because you *never* get it all exactly right the first time. Do
your best, test it against the real world, repeat.

David Grant wrote:
Had a curious thought just now. Are most of the people who design audio
equipment experienced in music production? It seems to me like it would be
essential for one to have this kind of background in order to have any shot
at making a successful design.

Most of the people who design audio equipment today have no concept of
music production. They are driven by marketing. Since they are selling
to people who also have no concept of music production,

This is why the market is flooded with equipment that is just plain unusable
for anything, like the C1000, the Alesis compressors, and the huge amount of
fake tube gear out there. It was designed to be cheap and to have a certain
set of "features" that can be mentioned in the advertising.

If the answer is yes, then I'm perplexed by the fact that I get the sense it
seems to be huge commitment to become experienced in music production, as
well as a huge commitment to understand and become proficient in electronics
design.

Yes, that's true. And on the high end of the market, there are plenty of
designers out there who are accomplished musicians (like Geoff Daking),
accomplished producers (everyone from Skipper Wise to George Massenburg),
and so forth. These are people who are making products based on what they
needed to do their job. But these folks are making high end gear that is
a tiny fraction of the current "pro audio" market.

In the past decade, the "pro audio" market has basically been taken over
by the consumer electronics industry, and it is now full of products that
are designed and sold like consumer electronics. The vast majority of
this stuff is crap: it's not convenient, doesn't sound good, and doesn't
last very long. But that's what the current market demands.

I'm pretty sure I want to do something along these lines as a career, but
ECE is so time-demanding I find myself lacking the skills (and equipment) I
need to critically evaluate something I design (in a qualitative sense).

So get practice in it! Start with something comparatively easy to evaluate
and easy to build, like power amplifiers. You can sit down with a power amp
and listen to records for days on end, which is something you can't so easily
do with a mike preamp. Get a sense of how different topologies sound and
what you like the sound of.

Hell, I probably put fifty or sixty hours of listening time into even
something like a simple DIY magazine article before I'm willing to put
my name on it. I probably went through twenty mikes before signing off
on the upcoming Oktava 219 modification article. You won't know how to
listen until you listen.

I can recommend Moulton's _Golden Ears_ CD set. It's certainly a good
ear training tool if you can spend the time and stick with it.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Scott Dorsey wrote:
I can recommend Moulton's _Golden Ears_ CD set.

Thanks, Scott; I'd heard good things about that set from other folks but
confirmation is helpfu.

Maybe this is semantics, but I 99% of the people who design pro audio
gear have a background in producing/engineering. I don't consider the
C1000 to be a pro product.

The people I know who make great gear that we all talk about and use
here, not only have a background in engineering, but test their
products out by makeing recordings with them. Their time is way skewed
towards designingin/manufacturing, but they all have personal studios
where they will try out gear.


I'm sure that they will tell you that their engineering skills are
developing at the same time as their design skills. If I were planning
to get into design as a carrer, I would plan to amke my skill
development as a desiginer and user a life long plan.

In article writes:

Had a curious thought just now. Are most of the people who design audio
equipment experienced in music production?

Most? I doubt it. But some are, and there's usually someone with some
audio production experience on the design team. However, these days it
may be someone whose experience is limited to audio production at home
on a computer.

If the answer is yes, then I'm perplexed by the fact that I get the sense it
seems to be huge commitment to become experienced in music production, as
well as a huge commitment to understand and become proficient in electronics
design.

It is. Often as not, the actual electronic design details are done by
an experienced electronic designer. But it takes someone with audio
production experience to understand how the product should work -
define what it needs to do, how well, and for how much. Greg Mackie is
a good example of that kind of person. When he ran the company that
bears his name, he was fair circuit designer - he could make things
that worked pretty well, but mostly he came up with great concepts for
products and defined their functional specifications. Then he let the
the team of engineers fill in the details, test the performance, and
bring back the results for his approval.


--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

You mean the new kork tube preamp isin't anygood!!!!:P

Jon



Scott Dorsey wrote:
David Grant wrote:

Had a curious thought just now. Are most of the people who design audio
equipment experienced in music production? It seems to me like it would be
essential for one to have this kind of background in order to have any shot
at making a successful design.


Most of the people who design audio equipment today have no concept of
music production. They are driven by marketing. Since they are selling
to people who also have no concept of music production,

This is why the market is flooded with equipment that is just plain unusable
for anything, like the C1000, the Alesis compressors, and the huge amount of
fake tube gear out there. It was designed to be cheap and to have a certain
set of "features" that can be mentioned in the advertising.


If the answer is yes, then I'm perplexed by the fact that I get the sense it
seems to be huge commitment to become experienced in music production, as
well as a huge commitment to understand and become proficient in electronics
design.


Yes, that's true. And on the high end of the market, there are plenty of
designers out there who are accomplished musicians (like Geoff Daking),
accomplished producers (everyone from Skipper Wise to George Massenburg),
and so forth. These are people who are making products based on what they
needed to do their job. But these folks are making high end gear that is
a tiny fraction of the current "pro audio" market.

In the past decade, the "pro audio" market has basically been taken over
by the consumer electronics industry, and it is now full of products that
are designed and sold like consumer electronics. The vast majority of
this stuff is crap: it's not convenient, doesn't sound good, and doesn't
last very long. But that's what the current market demands.


I'm pretty sure I want to do something along these lines as a career, but
ECE is so time-demanding I find myself lacking the skills (and equipment) I
need to critically evaluate something I design (in a qualitative sense).


So get practice in it! Start with something comparatively easy to evaluate
and easy to build, like power amplifiers. You can sit down with a power amp
and listen to records for days on end, which is something you can't so easily
do with a mike preamp. Get a sense of how different topologies sound and
what you like the sound of.

Hell, I probably put fifty or sixty hours of listening time into even
something like a simple DIY magazine article before I'm willing to put
my name on it. I probably went through twenty mikes before signing off
on the upcoming Oktava 219 modification article. You won't know how to
listen until you listen.

I can recommend Moulton's _Golden Ears_ CD set. It's certainly a good
ear training tool if you can spend the time and stick with it.
--scott

Studios used to have engineers and technicians. The engineers would have
a problem that needed fixing, so they would ask a technician to build a
sollution... It think it was as simple as that.
Now of course you need buzz words, a "target group" and endorsers etc...

Mike Caffrey wrote:

Maybe this is semantics, but I 99% of the people who design pro audio
gear have a background in producing/engineering. I don't consider the
C1000 to be a pro product.

How about the Mackie consoles? Much as I like Cal Perkins, I have to
say the Mackie SR24-4 is a prime example of a product that had clearly
never been tested by someone with actual mixing experience before it
shipped. There are so many little gotachas with it.

The people I know who make great gear that we all talk about and use
here, not only have a background in engineering, but test their
products out by makeing recordings with them. Their time is way skewed
towards designingin/manufacturing, but they all have personal studios
where they will try out gear.

Sadly, the great gear is a tiny fraction of the pro audio market. Not
necessarily just expensive gear here either... there are a lot of very
finely designed inexpensive products out there, that clearly were built
by engineers who wanted to solve an actual production problem. But there
is a lot more trash on the market than there ever used to be... I think
part of this has to do with the huge expansion of the market in the past
decade, and the fact that most of the market now consists of inexperienced
people who listen to marketing.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

David Grant wrote:
So is there a resource somewhere that I've missed (besides this NG) that
reviews the actual design and performance of various products and filters
out marketing. Would have to be, I'm assuming, some kind of non-profit
effort.

Well, there used to be R/E/.P..... but that was a couple decades back...
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

In article writes:

So is there a resource somewhere that I've missed (besides this NG) that
reviews the actual design and performance of various products and filters
out marketing. Would have to be, I'm assuming, some kind of non-profit
effort.

No, you have to read between the lines, and start with the assumption
that if you can easily afford it, it's probably junk. But there's a
lot of pretty functional junk out there that you can use if you
understand its limitations. That's the good part about what's happened
to the pro audio business.


--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

In article writes:

Well, there used to be R/E/.P..... but that was a couple decades back...

And Studio Sound. I keep hearing good things about Resolution, but
until they figure out a way to get paper issues over to the US for
free or at least inexpensively, I've been living without them.

Some of the reviews in Pro Audio Review are pretty good, particularly
the ones with the lab measurements. They may not be very extensive,
but they usually give you some sense of how the gear works in a real
working situation rather than on an editor's desk. Recording is OK,
too, most of the time, but articles everywhere are getting shorter (in
favor of having more articles, some of which might appeal to more
readers) so it's hard to get the whole story.

--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo