Simon,

You mis-interperted my post.

I've had experiance of the 28 week coarse lol, a few years back when I decided to start in this game I enrolled on a basic electronics AS coarse, for what I thought solid grounding.

The Coarse Tutor was a top guy, helpful and understanding of those  who wern't as sharpe as some in the class (I wasn't the oldest there   one chap 62  )

Moral, I saw 22 Y.O's struggling with basic arithmetic trying work out dividing networks and V=I*R  these were already A grade students.

All the notes were printed and layed out, and the only writing they were expected to do was fill in the blanks on the experiment sheets  .

A light year away from my last year in Uni (some 17 years before).

My pint being hands on experinace is possobly the best way to accquire knowledge for sure, however holding a basic grounding in the revelent subjects helps understand and absorb the experiance to a greater degree.

If your going to design and develop loudspeaker technology or digital signal processing or even mechanical isolation devices, it really does help having the relevent knowledege.

By no means does any one indivdual know it all, I'm still a novice is many areas and ayways learning.

However my training in earlier years has been invaluable.