<p>I certainly agree that grades will matter quite a bit for a highly technical field like audio engineering. I am an electrical engineer myself and know first hand what it takes to get through the math and physics courses that are involved. Many aspects of production are based on work experience or rules of thumb and are not nearly as dependent on higher mathematics, so there may be a bit more leniency there.</p>
<p>I have heard that same speech about grades from admissions officers, but find it far more instructive to observe what they do rather than what they say. Some schools do indeed put those principles into practice. However, there are some conservatories that will accept performance majors who had less than stellar GPAs, presumably because they had very good auditions. (There was a thread here on CC in which people were sharing URLs for Naviance sites at their high schools. By looking through a bunch of scatter charts, one could occasionally come across the GPA and SAT scores of unnamed students who were accepted or rejected at schools like Juilliard, NEC, Curtis and so forth where most of those admitted are performance majors of one sort or another.) There are also schools of music, some of them fairly good, associated with colleges and universities that accept a rather high percentage of applicants overall. Their music performance major acceptance rate may well be quite a bit lower than the overall rate, most particularly among female voice students, but for the most part they do not seem to be requiring higher academic standards for music majors than for the rest of the school. I can see how academics could be used in a tie-breaker sort of situation for the more popular voices and instruments, but my sense is that there are options out there for those who are very musically talented but who have not, for one reason or another, done as well with their grades. There will always be more doors open for those who have both the grades and the musical talent, however.</p>