Finding and fixing problems is a learned skill that can be honed over many years of experience. I have rarely seen this skill come naturally to people, though I suppose it must be a part of some of us. For me it took a number of years to get good.
The term itself, troubleshooting, originated from 'trouble hunter', which kind of makes sense. A shooter is a bit more direct than a hunter.
Running a high end audio company for the last 40 something years I have hunted and shot a lot of trouble; so much so that I tend to take the skill set for granted; that is until I run into trouble that's new to me. Yet those same skills are useful regardless of the trouble. I'll give you the most recent example that happened to me over the weekend. Suddenly, and without warning, my garage door opener wouldn't work. Okay, no biggie, must be the batteries. Nope. New batteries, no dice. Perhaps it's the programming: door opener lost its programming. Nope. Can't even get the remote control to program the opener. It was as if a giant field of inoperable waves had invaded my home. I googled garage door opener failures and got much in the way of 'secret military radio waves interfering'. Hmmm, seems like the conspiracy crowd is still alive and well (I do miss the supermarket Inquirer flying saucer stories). Realizing the likelihood of military interference in Boulder was slim, I started pulling my hair out. But then, my old troubleshooting skills kicked in (and yes, I'll bring it around to audio in a bit).
There must be something that changed in my home I was unaware of. Something must have happened that's causing this weird problem. Taking a deep breath I put my troubleshooter hat on and started with step one: go back to square one. Within three minutes I had discovered the problem.
Tomorrow I'll tell you what I discovered and the steps I took to discover it.
I think this might be valuable to all of us as a lesson in how to diagnose and fix problems with our stereo systems.
Stay tuned.
