I was also heavily into the electronics hobby at age 16, tinkered with amps, made some guitar effects, etc. But at the same time, I took a strong interest in math and science. And then... along came the personal computer and changed everything. Yes I'm that old.
And I ended up actually majoring in math and physics and continuing for a graduate degree in physics. Today I work alongside engineers, but I don't call myself an engineer.
One thing that any old fart like myself knows from experience is that you will change, and the world will change, as you progress through your education. So on the one hand it's great to have an interest that motivates you to learn and explore. At the same time, it's also worth accumulating the broadest and most general purpose knowledge possible, so that you have the option of changing your interests later if something really cool suddenly jumps out at you. I think the more broad and general knowledge is more resilient to change. Entire classes of technology have come and gone during my lifetime, but math and physics have remained my steady companions through those changes. Today, programming is probably one of those fundamentals too -- the skill remains the same even as the tools evolve. You owe it to yourself, to see if you can learn to program.
And in an area that's somewhat esoteric, like musical amplification, there probably aren't any good textbooks that are up to date. So an engineer has to come up with their own textbook so to speak, and that means being able to build up theory from the foundations. For instance I think there are probably only a handful of engineers who even know what the real world operating conditions for a bass amp consist of, or what measurements are important.
Don't ever downplay your tinkering skills. That's really valuable, and will serve you in any field. If you start doing cool stuff, no matter how humble, consider blogging about it. Communicating ideas is a big part of what good engineers do.
