Education: Best place for Audio Engineering?

Nicholas,

When the world was a larger place,you went where the specialists were congregated. Study automibles? Go Big Ten school close to Detroit. Motion pictures? Go Southern Cal close to Hollywood.

Now that the world is smaller,the best research and researchers are a few mouse clicks away.

Allow me to suggest that finding a school where you are comfortable,where your faculty advisor(s) will allow you to persue the work you want to do is important.

Internships? Post grad employment? What are the three speakers you respect the most? E mail their r and d departments and ask them what you've asked us.

Best wishes.

You may want to check out Essex University in the UK.
When I was there during the late eighties, they had an excellent electronics engineering faculty and had a strong audio engineering biais thanks to a couple of professor highly involved in HiFi.
One of our professors was Dr. Malcom Omar Hawksford - a very well known HiFi guru and an active member (Chairman?) of AES. He wrote the famous Essex Echos articles, some of which were published in HiFi News and did an amazing mathematical model on cables and the effect on signals and possible sound! He also did the definitive technical review of the Linn SONDEK CD12.
One of his student projects (not mine !) was on digital crossovers taking into account room correction using the Celestion 6000 with those spherical subwoofers.
Dr. Richard Bews was another professor highly involved with acclaimed but underated LFD amplifier brand taught us loudspeaker Design and Crossover theory using using Martin Colloms book 'High Performance Loudspeakers'.

Other HiFi brands I believe were involved with Essex University students and/or its professors include Audiolab, Pink Triangle the PIP pre-amp, Celestion, Musical Fidelity, Audio Physic....

My suggestion is:

1) Contact the audio companies you respect
2) Ask their designers which research papers they are reading and who their authors are.
3) Find out what schools those authors work at, apply to those graduate schools, and do your dissertation under those researchers.

I would be interested to hear what the results of this search would be. My understanding is there is not much going on in the way of home audio engineering research; so many of the design concepts are decades old that the significant work is on refining those concepts, not creating new ones.

Best,

Most good products are engineered by experienced engineers with many years of actual field work and product design experience.
Schools will teach you the basics. Seldom a pure  academic would be able to launch a sucessful product and make big bucks. It takes more than school to become a good engineer.
Get an internship with a good company to learn the whole product design cycle.
Make sure that you love what you are doing, if you are going to be good at it.

You can learn a lot about acoustics in the Navy.  But then again you will probably be underwater for months at a time.