In this episode we enjoy the pleasure of chatting with Michael Lawrence a freelance audio engineer well known for his own podcast Signal to Noise, his incredibly geeky articles in Live Sound International, his Rational Acoustics Smaart webinars, and of course his work as a systems engineer.  We discuss how his career path, some great tips on reading material, and a lot of hints and suggestions for people looking to get into systems engineering and design, but also how to communicate effectively with system engineers.