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Getting to the point...

Let's face it, there is a generic division between those who experience the world and attempt to understand it, and those who find everything they need to know in books (but only certain books...) and battle the infidels who might question the perfection of their circular logic.

Someone once defined engineering as a collection of successful recipes. In every branch of engineering, there are basic recipes and advanced practices. The few major engineering advances made in reponse to scientific inquiry are glorified in the history books and used to suppress the ubiquitous messy grunt work of trial-and-error that underlies most actual success.

The bipolar transistor was invented by people trying to make field effect devices, and it took them over a year to figure out what they had done in order to publish a scientifically defensible description. The semiconductor industry as we know it grew slowly at first because the messy grunt work of understanding the silicon lattice as it is grown in practice had to be done (and is still going on), and the awesome sensitivity to impurities at every step had to be overcome (anyone remember MOSTEK?).

The audio engineer-chauvinists dismiss non-technical audiophiles because they manage to come up with such colorful descriptions of what they think is going on with their successful tweaks. Instead, the engineers should ask themselves what is missing in the engineering canon, such that the tweaks are successful in spite of thorough engineering of the untweaked components. The audiophiles are doing the messy grunt work, but most engineers refuse to recognize and learn from it.

In my professional experience in the semiconductor industry, the more successful engineers have a healthy skepticism for the overly-simplified models used in classrooms, and are always looking for ways around the limitations of the analytical tools. They develop the advanced practices that make their company a survivor. The engineers full of themselves do not typically survive the next RIF.

Advanced engineering practices have economic value as intellectual property. Only those whose logical underpinning is authority would think this IP should be freely shared, as though everything worth knowing is already written down somewhere and all we have to do is trade references.

"I know next to nothing about microphones. I was sincerely hoping to learn more."

And how much did you expect to pay for it?

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