I have found much the same on other forums as well. Rubbish talkers on diyaudio do not last long with their foolishness. I do belong to other non technical forums but like you I found it does no good arguing with a sign post. I do not like to think it is because they are 70+ being that I am in that age group. There are many younger ones on other forums wanting to feel important and think they have found forum where they can fool less technical members with their rubbish talk. Recently on a speaker forum one 70+ guy was trying to convince others he can hear the difference in a 1/4 inch of wire. Also touting zip ties degrade the sound. With someone like that you will never win an argument with them.
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The course I am talking about has sections on a simulation software called CircuitMaker. It is a free download. I have downloaded it but do not think I will use it much if any. Designing circuits is not something I am interested in. I have browsed the video some and find it fascinating and if I were younger I would take more interest in designing. I really admire the members on this forum who do and follow through with making a PCB. After the 33 hours of basics the course branches off into digital electronics and circuit and PCB making. The headline of the course is "Learn Electronics and PCB Design from the Ground up with Altium CircuitMaker and Labcenter Proteus" I am sure it would not hurt to learn how to use this software and travel on to another at a later time. I am skimming through the digital part picking up a few things. Again it is not something I am interested in but it does not hurt to learn something new. Not sure how many members are interested in digital being that this is an audio forum. I consider the courses on this subject as a bonus. Learn as much or as little as you care to after taking the basics. Remember the course book is over 900 pages long. Way more info that I am willing to wade through. If someone can absorb everything in this course I believe they are well on their way to being an electrical engineer.
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Thank you! I did get the course you mentioned. They offered a package deal with a course using the Autodesk software. I'll check out the software mentioned in the crash course also.
Once I feel comfortable analyzing most things manually, then I'll let the computer do it. 🙂
FWIW - I think this website is also quite good.
All About Circuits - Electrical Engineering & Electronics Community
Their textbooks are free, and I find them extremely useful. Textbook for Electrical Engineering & Electronics
I found that the on-line pathways vs. the .pdf versions of the books differ a bit. I personally prefer the .pdf.
Once I feel comfortable analyzing most things manually, then I'll let the computer do it. 🙂
FWIW - I think this website is also quite good.
All About Circuits - Electrical Engineering & Electronics Community
Their textbooks are free, and I find them extremely useful. Textbook for Electrical Engineering & Electronics
I found that the on-line pathways vs. the .pdf versions of the books differ a bit. I personally prefer the .pdf.
I look forward to your impressions of the course.
For the nerds on this forum I found this video last night on youtube I found very interesting. Not truly audio but the manufacturing process of chips. Video is 8 years old so not the new and latest but fascinating for me. One thing that may peak members interest is chips use mosfets with gate source drain. I also learned in the course the reason why mosfets with a gate in chips. My very limited understanding is a gate is not directly attached but acts more like a capacitor to turn the transistor on. More efficient.
Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips - YouTube
For the nerds on this forum I found this video last night on youtube I found very interesting. Not truly audio but the manufacturing process of chips. Video is 8 years old so not the new and latest but fascinating for me. One thing that may peak members interest is chips use mosfets with gate source drain. I also learned in the course the reason why mosfets with a gate in chips. My very limited understanding is a gate is not directly attached but acts more like a capacitor to turn the transistor on. More efficient.
Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips - YouTube
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For the last 12 years of my 41 year engineering career I worked in a research group. I was the guy that actually built a physical device from all the calculation and simulation done by the brainiacs. That's what I liked to do, and the big boys couldn't or wouldn't take the time to build stuff. The way to the top of the corporate ladder is paved with patents and publications. I did manage to learn my way around HP / Agilent's ADS simulator, and I know enough LT Spice to get it to do what I want. It is an excellent tool for telling you if your idea is too dumb to ever work, or let you find your stupid mistakes. Especially in the tube world where the models are of varying quality, you can't expect perfect results in regard to distortion or stability performance though.
My parents frowned on me dragging dead radios, TV's and other stuff home from the trash to take apart. I had to work on my "trash" outside or in an old metal tool shed with a bare dirt floor in the Florida heat and humidity. Considering that most of it had a hot chassis, it was a shocking time in my life. Only things that were cleaned up and made working were allowed into the house. We lived in a rural area west of Miami Florida with a lake in the back yard. Somewhere out in the middle of that lake is an artificial reef made from 1950's vintage discarded electronics. All CRTs were vented to atmosphere with a rifle, otherwise they float.
One of my friends was the neighborhood chemist. Brake fluid and pool chlorine tablets make a neat yellow-green fire without matches.
That fascination lasted to well into adulthood. Every 4th of July and New Year's Eve we entertained the neighbors with a display of store bought and DIY pyrotechnics. The cops looked the other way on those two days. Right after 911 a cop politely told me that they knew who the players are, and that our fun was actually a felony, and they were instructed not to look the other way any longer. Game over. I do not know where this came from.
Oh, those poor, poor army men and action figures.
But they made a cool sound as the burned and dripped flaming plastic.
I am now 68 years old. I believe that you should keep learning new things throughout your life. When you stop learning, you start growing old. When you start growing old, you start dying. The internet has made huge amounts of information easily available. Much of it is pure garbage, but the opportunities for learning something new have never been better. In my young years learning even the basics in the electronics world was very hard, as information was hard to get......that's whey we had to take stuff apart to see how it worked.
The real step forward in my electronics quest happened when I convinced a neighborhood ham radio guy to take apart his brothers Fender Champ guitar amp so that we could trace it's schematic. Now I had a known good circuit for a real guitar amp. I had a huge pile of parts from the remains of all the stuff I had taken apart. Armed with little knowledge, a lot of parts, and a lot of time, I made my first real guitar amp, without the benefit of a soldering iron. I was about 10 years old. Today one quick Google search could have found that schematic in seconds.
Udemy, and the others are just another tool in the quest for knowledge. You could likely find the same knowledge without spending any money, but at the cost of time, and wading through more BS. Youtube is often a good place to see how to do some tasks like taking stuff apart without breaking it. A teardown of modern laptop, a car door, or a sump pump were useful videos when I needed to fix things. It is also a good place to learn how not to do something.
At this point in my (retirement) life money is a relatively known quantity. Time is always an unknown and the odds keep changing, but it is a declining commodity, don't waste it.
Attachments
While I was typing my last post I got an Email bomb from Udemy listing hundreds of courses with steep discounts. From now until Jan. 7
@Tubelab
Thank you very much for the elaborate story. The book you recommended on music theory has caught my eye and I will check it out, thank you.
And yes, the Crash Course Electronics and PCB Design is now on sale for 10 EUR. Just picked it up. I hope I will finish it 😉
Thank you very much for the elaborate story. The book you recommended on music theory has caught my eye and I will check it out, thank you.
And yes, the Crash Course Electronics and PCB Design is now on sale for 10 EUR. Just picked it up. I hope I will finish it 😉
Well said! I appreciate the stories. One of the things that can be a detriment to the internet is losing sight of humanity. So, although I could never described as concise, I always try to appreciate the person I imagine talking with behind my screen.
I grew up (my wife would argue that point) at the interesting time during the emergence of PCs and the use of the internet before it became ubiquitous. I feel like I got the best of both worlds. I still had to take a typewriter to college, but I learned both word processing and "typing" in middle school. Through graduate school, most of the materials I needed for research were still in bound publications to be borrowed from other schools or from our library. Computers and brilliant code writers made statistical analysis far less time consuming. Lexis/Nexis was still awesome, and we still used a lot of microfilm and microfiche. We still had to work hard to find relevant information, and a librarian was someone to be appreciated. If someone beat us to it, or worse yet we missed a relevant piece of work, we were hosed.
Learning how to find and apply information used to further knowledge may be a dying art. Digging to find the seminal works, citing those to whom credit is due, and solving a problem or answering a question through a controlled methodology, is a fundamental set of skills I speculate is diminishing. It's just too easy to get "the answer". Sadly, often the answers provided on "the internet" are wrong and/or can be easily misapplied without some level of critical thinking.
Don't get me wrong, having information at our fingertips in a few ms has sped development in ways I couldn't have imagined when I was a kid, and I'm only just approaching 50. However, I do think there is some downside. Now, everyone is an expert with a keyboard, everyone is 'published', and the most popular answer may be considered correct by some because it's the #1 search result provided by an algorithm that most likely weighs popularity over correctness.
The tools we have available to help further and share knowledge are absolutely remarkable. Now that I have a bit of time over the holidays, I am trying to take full advantage of the opportunity to learn a little something new and bolster some knowledge in a few areas. Separate from electronics, my brother gifted us a subscription to Masterclass. I've found a few interesting tidbits so far. There's even one led by Carlos Santana. Did I learn to play guitar any better, nope. Was it intended for me as a complete novice, nope. Was it absolutely ******* cool, yep!
tl;dr - I agree wholeheartedly.
P.S. Once I get through some basics and a few other projects, I will definitely be hitting you up for advice on guitar amps.
Patrick
I grew up (my wife would argue that point) at the interesting time during the emergence of PCs and the use of the internet before it became ubiquitous. I feel like I got the best of both worlds. I still had to take a typewriter to college, but I learned both word processing and "typing" in middle school. Through graduate school, most of the materials I needed for research were still in bound publications to be borrowed from other schools or from our library. Computers and brilliant code writers made statistical analysis far less time consuming. Lexis/Nexis was still awesome, and we still used a lot of microfilm and microfiche. We still had to work hard to find relevant information, and a librarian was someone to be appreciated. If someone beat us to it, or worse yet we missed a relevant piece of work, we were hosed.
Learning how to find and apply information used to further knowledge may be a dying art. Digging to find the seminal works, citing those to whom credit is due, and solving a problem or answering a question through a controlled methodology, is a fundamental set of skills I speculate is diminishing. It's just too easy to get "the answer". Sadly, often the answers provided on "the internet" are wrong and/or can be easily misapplied without some level of critical thinking.
Don't get me wrong, having information at our fingertips in a few ms has sped development in ways I couldn't have imagined when I was a kid, and I'm only just approaching 50. However, I do think there is some downside. Now, everyone is an expert with a keyboard, everyone is 'published', and the most popular answer may be considered correct by some because it's the #1 search result provided by an algorithm that most likely weighs popularity over correctness.
The tools we have available to help further and share knowledge are absolutely remarkable. Now that I have a bit of time over the holidays, I am trying to take full advantage of the opportunity to learn a little something new and bolster some knowledge in a few areas. Separate from electronics, my brother gifted us a subscription to Masterclass. I've found a few interesting tidbits so far. There's even one led by Carlos Santana. Did I learn to play guitar any better, nope. Was it intended for me as a complete novice, nope. Was it absolutely ******* cool, yep!
tl;dr - I agree wholeheartedly.
P.S. Once I get through some basics and a few other projects, I will definitely be hitting you up for advice on guitar amps.
Patrick
Ten Euro's, that is a deal anyone interested in electronics should consider. About the price of a fast food meal. I guaranty you will learn something new or it will refresh the memory of EE on this site. There is no test to pass, just listen to what you want to when you want to and skip the rest. It is nice to understand some about the amplifiers we are building. I have built 70 or 80% of NP's projects including the Zen series.
Always a bummer buying something and a few days later it is on sale. Even at $100 I think it is a good deal. A power transformer with shipping is close to that price.
Personally, I am more likely to complete the course and to understand its contents when working with others.
If anyone is interested in forming a study / motivation group for electronics fundamentals, please let me know. 🙂
If anyone is interested in forming a study / motivation group for electronics fundamentals, please let me know. 🙂
I've some experience with Udemy courses, they are quite clever in the prices they offer. Sometimes it can help to access it via Incognito-mode in Google. Also, once you've bought courses they figure you can pay some more, so logging out from your Udemy account, clearing browser cache, accessing from another IP etc can help. Also, if you happen to be able to connect with the creator of the course, they can sometimes give you a link for the lowest possible price, usually a tenner.
And i want to echo the suggestion from Tubelab to check the preview out, what point is there to have access to 30+ hours of content if you can't stand listening to the teacher for more than 2 minutes 🙂
And i want to echo the suggestion from Tubelab to check the preview out, what point is there to have access to 30+ hours of content if you can't stand listening to the teacher for more than 2 minutes 🙂
We discussed lots of Udemy courses here about 8 months ago. During that time I learned lots of new ways to annoy my neighbors with strange sounds coming from my basement with Ableton live.
I had recommended some courses from an instructor named Jason Allen. I also suggested to wait for the inevitable sale on any course that you are interested in and not absolutely in a hurry for. Today I got an email from Jason Allen about a course he offers with the best possible sale price.....FREE!
So if you want to play with Audacity, or learn a bit more about its features, this is a two day sale. I grabbed it since it fits my budget, but I have not actually started it yet. For free, why not?
Audacity: Producing & Recording with Powerful Free Software | Udemy
I had recommended some courses from an instructor named Jason Allen. I also suggested to wait for the inevitable sale on any course that you are interested in and not absolutely in a hurry for. Today I got an email from Jason Allen about a course he offers with the best possible sale price.....FREE!
So if you want to play with Audacity, or learn a bit more about its features, this is a two day sale. I grabbed it since it fits my budget, but I have not actually started it yet. For free, why not?
Audacity: Producing & Recording with Powerful Free Software | Udemy