Where is Vietnam Headed? APDA Promotes Supply Chain and Manufacturing Webinar, July 22

The Audio Product Development Alliance (APDA) is hosting a new live webinar focused on sourcing from Vietnam and the current uncertainty in global trade. During this new APDA presentation, Bruce Crompton, a veteran of Asia’s manufacturing and supply chain with over 25 years of experience spanning China and Vietnam, will provide a unique perspective about how Vietnam is evolving and the opportunities for the audio industry. What’s changing in Vietnam and where is it headed? How is Vietnam reacting to US tariffs and global realignment?

Cardinal Peak announced a strategic partnership with Audinate to establish a Dante Development Center in Vietnam. The new development center will offer custom Dante development expertise to OEMs and hardware manufacturers, speeding up time to market. The collaboration will also accelerate the integration of Audinate's Dante audio and video solutions for manufacturers through Cardinal Peak’s extensive engineering services expertise.

xMEMS Labs and Bujeon Electronics have partnered to create a family of 2-way speaker modules to accelerate design of next generation high-resolution and lossless audio-capable TWS earbuds. The solution integrates a high-performance 9mm dynamic driver custom-designed by Bujeon with an xMEMS' Cowell tweeter, the world’s smallest monolithic MEMS microspeaker at just 22mm. The reference design combines an xMEMS Aptos MEMS speaker amplifier to create a "drop-in" solution compatible with today’s leading TWS system-on-chips.

The Audio Product Education Institute (APEI), an initiative of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) promotes another of its Supply Chain and Sourcing education sessions to assess the manufacturing alternatives outside of China. This time, the webinar is focused on what is widely regarded as one of the most attractive and convenient options for audio manufacturing in Asia - Vietnam.

This article for Voice Coil magazine offers a valuable perspective about one of the most promising manufacturing opportunities in Asia. While there has been speaker parts manufacturing and speaker assembly for more than 20 years in Vietnam, the recent influx of speaker and audio OEM/ODMs that are expanding satellite factories through the country was motivated particularly by companies looking to counter the trading tariffs imposed in the United States. This article was originally published in Voice Coil, September 2020.

This is certainly a very heterogeneous edition of Voice Coil. It features a special report about manufacturing in Vietnam, complete with a directory and a list of trade shows. Igor Levitsky returns to offer valuable details about the latest Radian Audio Engineering LT2/LT6 Ribbon Planar transducers. James Croft reviews a "Venting System for Vehicle Speaker Assembly patent," recently granted to Harman. And, Vance Dickason characterizes the ND45 1" compression driver from Oberton, and the TW29TXN-B-4 TeXtreme diaphragm tweeter from SB Acoustics' Satori line. Voice Coil September 2020 is now available online and in print.