Hear the Future. Global Audio Summit 2025, Shanghai, China
April 3 2025, 18:10
Over a period of 10 days, at the end of March 2025, I have visited the vibrant Shanghai region of China following an invitation by the China Audio Industry Association (CAIA) to attend the organization's Global Audio Summit 2025. I have often participated in events promoted by national and international audio industry associations, mostly oriented by scientific, academic, engineering, or trading charters. But this one was one of the most vibrant product development conferences I have ever attended. Here is my report.
Over a period of 10 days, at the end of March 2025, I have visited the vibrant Shanghai region of China following an invitation by the China Audio Industry Association (CAIA) to attend the organization's Global Audio Summit 2025. I have often participated in events promoted by national and international audio industry associations, mostly oriented by scientific, academic, engineering, or trading charters. But this one was one of the most vibrant product development conferences I have ever attended.
The Global Audio Summit is promoted by the China Audio Industry Association (CAIA) and the Shanghai Intex Exhibition with endorsement by the Shanghai Municipality.
While I have used my time in the region to visit factories and get to know multiple audio industry efforts that companies are undertaking in China, this was an excellent opportunity to better understand the state of the audio industry in China and participate in a very well-organized conference. In fact, the CAIA Global Audio Summit is exactly what should be expected from an audio industry association event, combining excellent technical presentations in the most relevant and trending topics, keynote sessions, discussion panels (fireside chats), an awards ceremony, and an exhibition area. Benefiting from the excellent facilities of the modern Zhangjiang Science Hall, in Pudong, Shanghai, I was told by those who have participated in previous editions that this 2025 Global Audio Summit was the biggest and best to date.
An extensive conference program covering Smart In-Car Audio, AI+Audio, and Hearing Assistance and Healthcare sessions, plus keynotes and discussion panels over two days. The panel of guest speakers was simply impressive.
Chen Lixin, Executive Vice-President of the China Audio Industry Association, opens the keynote sessions on the first day of the Global Audio Summit 2025.
This event is promoted as "a gathering of top experts and enterprises in the global audio industry to discuss the latest breakthroughs and future trends in audio technology." This year, the theme for the conference was "Hear the Future, AI+Audio" and encompassed sessions on automotive audio, the use of artificial intelligence technology for all sorts of audio applications, with a big accent on audio signal processing and language, hearing assistance and healthcare, and earbuds and hearables.
With the main auditorium holding the keynote sessions during the two mornings of March 26-27, there were three other conference rooms for Smart In-Car Audio, AI+Audio, and Hearing Assistance and Healthcare sessions, some taking place concurrently. The extensive program included presentations by all the leading Chinese technology companies, sharing details on their cutting-edge audio technologies, best practices, product case studies, and R&D roadmaps. All sessions had an excellent technical level, while embracing a practical and insightful format to share essential knowledge, without any of the useless academic restrictions and format protocols that frequently thwart audio conferences held in the US or Europe.
Not only were the technical topics addressed among the most interesting possible for the current state of audio technology, but the tone was always constructive and captivating - only limited by the language barrier for those of us who are not fluent in Chinese. All the sessions had AI-based English language translation available - being obvious that no human translator would be able to keep up with the pace and depth of the presentations. The available English text transcriptions provided enough of an understanding about what was being talked about, albeit distorting the full deep knowledge that was shared in the process.
Under the banner of the High-Definition Wireless Audio (HWA) organization, the China Audio Industry Association promoted the official industrial launch of the L2HC codec.
Ceremony of the official launch of the L2HC codec, an effort originally announced in 2022, is now available to all the industry association members.
At the end of the first day, the Global Audio Summit included a networking dinner followed by a "fireside chat" discussion panel with top industry executives (Founders, CEOs, General Managers of Edifier, Hifiman, Huawei, Wanmo (1More), Tencent, Airsmart, and others) and an award ceremony recognizing the most important innovations in the audio field.
China Audio Industry Association
For context, the China Audio Industry Association (CAIA) is an official organization founded in 1983 to represent China's relevant enterprises, institutions, and individuals, and promote the research and development, production, and trade of electronic audio products. The association's headquarters are located in the Shanghai Zhangjiang High-tech Park where the Summit takes place, with representation offices in Beijing and Guangzhou. It currently represents more than 400 companies in more than 20 provinces, cities, autonomous regions, and Hong Kong, including manufacturers of all audio product categories.
Interestingly, the China Audio Industry Association also promotes standards initiatives and currently promotes specific strategic audio technology efforts. Those currently include two derived industry organizations: the High-Definition Wireless Audio (HWA), and the China Hearing Aid Association (also referred to as CAIA's Hearing Aid Industry Branch or Assisted Hearing Branch). Specifically, under the HWA initiatives, the association promoted the "Wireless Audio Coding and Decoding" working group, which jointly issued the "Low Latency and Low Complexity HD Audio Coding and Decoding Technical Specification" (L2HC) standard.
Based on the specifications that CAIA published in July 2022, the L2HC codec is seen as a key strategic technology for wireless products to evolve beyond the quality constraints of Bluetooth and enabling high-resolution audio. This was one of the initiatives that was officially launched at this Global Audio Summit 2025. L2HC supports 24-bit/96kHz encoding and decoding with 64kbps to 1920kbps bit rate adaptive switching under a unified architecture, with excellent anti-interference performance. It is seen by all the large Chinese manufacturers as a key alternative to Fraunhofer's LC3plus, the Taiwan Shengwei Advanced Technology LHDC codec, Sony's LDAC, or Qualcomm's aptX Adaptive.
The China Hearing Aid Association is currently promoting efforts on multiple technology fronts aiming to converge hearing aid and hearing assistance technologies in new consumer-oriented platforms, including emerging true wireless and glasses formats.
Right outside the themed sessions of the conference, the exhibition area provided an interesting opportunity to meet key technology suppliers from China and other countries. That included a good percentage of audio and acoustics measurement solutions.
USound, the Austrian specialist in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), was one of the exhibitors. The company recently announced a new design win featuring USound MEMS drivers, in partnership with Dongguan Hele Electronics, the parent company of QCY, a recognized Chinese manufacturer of wireless audio products.
The Alango Technologies team, led by Alexander Goldin, was present at the CAIA Global Audio Summit for the third year in a row. The company promoted its latest demonstrations of technologies for hearables, including hearing enhancement and conversation boost with smart glasses, an area that most brands in China are actively pursuing and that generated great interest among attendees.
The exhibition area of the CAIA Global Audio Summit is undoubtedly one of the components that is mostly contributing to the international projection of the event, although clearly geared to the China industry.
Hear the Future, AI Audio
With the breadth and scope covered at this Global Audio Summit 2025 event, I have noted enough material for multiple articles. It would be impossible for me to address all the different things that impressed and inspired me after attending the conference. I will just note some of my key impressions here.
Starting with how impressive Shanghai is as a modern city, and how it keeps evolving so quickly - particularly for someone more used to visiting China's south cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou. I was particularly impressed to note how the intense traffic and bustling roads in Shanghai are now almost silent, with electric vehicles largely dominating. Less than 25% of vehicles are now hybrids and traditional combustion engines, while two-wheelers are almost 100% electric now. And with Chinese brands completely dominating the roads, there should be no doubts about the momentum for China's automotive industry.
Second, it is impressive how the audio industry in China is committed to focusing on technological innovation, after leading a massive industrial transformation. In Shanghai, Apple AirPods are very visible in everyone's ears, but in the streets and shopping malls, the massive Huawei, Xiaomi, and Honor flagship stores have the most advanced smartphones and are all used to showcase new impressive cars. The Huawei flagship store in the bustling Nanjing Road displayed eight different models of modern EVs, from luxury SUVs to a compact sport sedan. Inside those vehicles, Dolby Atmos audio experiences and movie-watching are standout features.
As I've recently seen at the MWC 2025 show in Barcelona, the latest true wireless open earbuds, particularly the ear-clips designs, are receiving a lot of attention and starting to challenge the still dominant premium in-ears with ANC. Not surprisingly, during the Global Audio Summit 2025, a lot was discussed about advanced AI features for adaptive processing meeting the needs of the open-ear designs - a large challenge that all brands and ODMs are determined to face. Likewise, references to lossless hi-res and high-quality streaming at up to 4Mbps were frequent, indicating that a mix of proprietary efforts and Bluetooth High Data Throughput (HDT) are about to burst into the market.
The keynote sessions included a fascinating presentation by Liu Junfeng, Group Vice President of Science and Technology University Xunfei, and General Manager of Intelligent Automobile Division for iFlytek titled "AI and Sound Fusion: Exploring a New Path for Future In-Car Sound Experience." Covering the trajectory of AI applications in audio signal processing for multiple categories, his session revealed well how China is determined to fill its last remaining gap in chips and computing technologies required for the most advanced applications. As a partially state-owned enterprise, spun off from the University of Science and Technology, iFlytek is leading China's efforts in voice synthesis, speech recognition, and natural language processing.
Another keynote session was from Zhou Wenjiang, Vice President of Technology of Tencent Music Entertainment Group (QQ Music and Kuwo Music), a leading expert with nearly 20 years of experience in technical and product research and development in audio and video AI and leading the largest online music platform in China.
With multiple sessions discussing the state of the art in AI applications, it is clear how the topic is currently top of mind for all the companies in China, as it is globally.
One of many sessions discussing audio signal processing and AI for consumer products and automotive applications. China is now leading in implementation for new designs, even if in partnership with the leading players in that field, from Europe and the US.
As was shared by government officials presenting at this event, in 2024, the total output value of China's electronic audio industry reached 382.3 billion yuan ($52.4 billion USD), an increase of 5.37% over the same period last year, while the total export volume was $36.2 billion US dollars. The main audio products, such as speakers, headphones, and power amplifiers, achieved double growth in volume and output value. China's patent activity in the field of audio is now the highest in the world.
The hundred top experts in audio that presented at the Global Audio Summit 2025 reflected the increasing attention that innovative applications and technologies have for the more than 600 companies represented by the more than 1000 attendees. As the topic "Hearing the Future, Audio+AI" reflected, hearables and the convergence between consumer TWS earbuds and hearing aids are a focus, as are new advanced audio processing technologies for car audio.
One of the three vehicles available for demonstration in the outside area of the Science Hall, all from Chinese brands. In this case, an implementation from the NIO engineering team and DIRAC.
The top-of-the-line model from NIO served to showcase the ultimate level of immersive experience and advanced user interfaces.
I was particularly impressed by the informal tone of the presentations, sharing both scientific research and product development insights from leading companies such as Huawei, iFLYTEK, Tencent, Lenovo, Xiaomi, Goertek, Guoguang Electronics, Edifier, Luxshare, AAC Technologies, and many Chinese universities and research institutes. Of course, the largest motivation for that knowledge sharing was to attract technical talent to join those efforts, but there was also a clear sense of mission in the way I've seen some presenters explaining in detail how their efforts failed or are still lacking. This was frequently the case for smart glasses, where clearly no company has had yet seen success, but where most of these companies are committed to leading and getting to a projected finished line. It's just that so much "product" focus sometimes blurs the vision of what that finished line might involve.
I was also impressed by some of the messages shared in the keynote presentations. Such as the message that production in China has now passed the threshold of matching quality and cost. China is able to do both and is now starting to lead the product design process, although still lacking in many of the software and design tools. China's audio industry is also set to explore new paths in globalization and localization. There is a clear conscience that China is lacking in brands and core brand values - but that is a cultural barrier that will not be easy to bring down.
Coincidentally, in my own presentation, I discussed how artificial intelligence is enabling more advanced voice and language processing applications, and how I see language as the largest market opportunity for the audio industry. AI can help bridge those "language islands" that today separate people, culture, and much of our understanding of the world.
And as I see Chinese manufacturers already leading in the effort to combine all the technical elements to lead in language applications, I would not be surprised if many of China's brands will be able to finally break those last remaining cultural barriers.
I was invited to present one of the keynote sessions together with Adam Levenson (Levenson Consulting), both representing the education efforts of the Audio Product Development Alliance (APDA). Our joint presentation discussed Brand Identity and how brand concepts and techniques can help audio innovators more effectively communicate their unique value in today's rapidly evolving marketplace. The session reflects the growing interest by companies from China addressing global markets.
During the presentation, as audioXpress editor-in-chief, I discussed key technology trends such as edge AI and smart sensors (AI in sensor) for adaptive processing, sound classification through deep learning, enhancing our sense of hearing, smart assistants, and supporting language applications.
The 2026 edition of the CAIA Global Audio Summit is already being planned, and we strongly recommend attending and participating in this key audio industry event.
International Contact
Ariel Greenberger
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This article was originally published in The Audio Voice newsletter, (#509), April 3, 2025.
About Joao Martins
Since 2013, Joao Martins leads audioXpress as editor-in-chief of the US-based magazine and website, the leading audio electronics, audio product development and design publication, working also as international editor for Voice Coil, the leading periodical for... Read more
