i, too, am an 'audio guy'...
i got my start doing outdoor shows in washington, dc...you know, like earth day, the NOW rally, taste of d.c., million man march, etc...i started building stages, but after a few weeks of non-stop 20 hour days lifting steal and 4x8 foot wooden decking panels (you can actally carry two of these at once, one on each shoulder...mostly balance
) i got tired (literally) of this...i moved to lighting for awhile, but the company i was with didn't have any moving lights and i didn't know enough to actually LD the shows, so this got pretty boring also...so then i started doing sound...
that was about 8 years ago...now a-days i freelance locally which i much more enjoy because i get much better money and i can stay home with my son more...i mostly do A1 stuff for 'industial', or corporate, audio...fairly boring stuff but sometimes it's fun (the technical side is always fun, it's trying to stay awake during the show that's the hard part)...i do get the occasional good band still tho...
i've also tried reading some of the news groups but found there were way too many messages to keep up with...also, it seemed that most of them were just bickering back and forth about mostly opinion-oriented stuff anyhow...all the engineers i've met in my life, not one of them does the same thing the same way...part of the reason i find it interesting
...