Methods and techniques of engineering as studied and thought in schools may be subject to peer review, as is some R&D work, but not the engineering work itself. Do you know of any audio manufacturer who publishes full designs including all manufacturing details..?
I do not work in the audio industry. I have worked in radar, satcom, instrumentation, serial links (PCIe/SAS/SATA/SONNET), analog and digital signal processing, and so forth designing custom ICs and systems but all at generally much higher frequencies than audio. I guess it depends upon how you define "peer". Internal reviews usually involved the design team (design engineers working on different projects) plus other teams (packaging, production, quality, marketing, etc.) Then there were reviews with the customers, which often included their own design team. Often enough "scientists", the basic research folk, were involved as well (depending upon the project). Sometimes the work was published, but often enough not (proving your point) to retain the intellectual property as proprietary. Patents were often avoided for the same reason, though that trend has mostly flipped in the decades since I began my career (patents were usually shunned as letting the secrets out, but now are encouraged and companies make significant revenue from them). Engineering work, or at least the end products, were built and tested to appropriate standards (usually developed by scientists and engineers working together). The goal was compliance to those standards and engineering details were retained in-house.
One argument is that only basic research is consistently published and peer-reviewed and only scientists can do such research. Public (peer) review of engineering designs is rare, I agree, but as an admittedly biased engineer and not a scientist I do not have a problem with that. What matters is the performance of the end product, and what's inside to get that performance is the "secret sauce" belonging to the company that paid for it and engineers who designed it. A viewpoint that treats fundamental research, funded publicly, and implementation differently. That said I do not have a problem with Bell Labs or T.J. Watson Research Center using corporate money on basic research that is retained by the corporation. As I have said elsewhere, if my tax dollars paid for it, then I do feel I have a right to read the results (whether I understand it or not).
I have seen similar things in the chemical and drug industries, with whom I had only a very tangential relationship when designing a chip for some application in those areas.
IMO - Don
