At the Beijing Auto Show, automakers are usually the easiest players to spot. Giant screens, new model debuts, company executives, and crowds chasing online attention make up the familiar rhythm of the event.
But inside this year’s exhibition halls, Sonavox used a customized booth of more than 200 square meters to bring an industry that often stays hidden behind finished vehicles into the foreground.
At the center of the booth, two demo vehicles equipped with Sonavox acoustic solutions appeared side by side. One leaned toward high-end configuration, while the other targeted the more mainstream family car market. At car shows, component suppliers usually do not present themselves this way. Most display specific product lines. Sonavox had those on-site too, but the larger point was to show system-level capability.
Of the two demo vehicles, the high-end model was equipped with 60 speakers, delivering a flagship 10.3.10.8-channel solution with a 4,000-watt amplifier. The lower- to midrange model was equipped with 12–21 speakers, but could still deliver a cost-effective 7.1.4 immersive audio solution.
Sonavox R&D staff described the two solutions as the flagship and mass market versions, respectively:
- The flagship version demonstrates Sonavox’s ability to precisely control complex sound fields under high-compute, multichannel conditions.
- The mass market version relies on proprietary algorithms and refined tuning to compensate for a smaller number of hardware components. Its goal is to serve as a competitive solution for the lower-end and midrange market, giving consumers who spend around RMB 200,000 (USD 29,360) on a car an acoustic experience closer to that of high-end models.
The two solutions differ sharply in product philosophy. One pursues the extreme, while the other emphasizes practicality. But they share the same full-stack, self-developed software and hardware platform. That is what Sonavox wants to communicate through the two vehicles: the company behind these demo cars and solutions already has complete delivery capability, from hardware to algorithms to systems.
Sonavox has kept a relatively low profile in automotive acoustics. From a small township factory in Suzhou, it has grown into a leading player in the global automotive acoustics industry. It has also been reinventing itself. For more than four decades, its main business was in-vehicle speakers, standardized hardware products sold by unit. But as new energy automakers’ demand for smart cabins has surged, Sonavox has begun moving from a single-product supplier to a full-stack acoustic solutions provider.
This was Sonavox’s second time participating in an auto show. Its first was last year’s Auto Shanghai, where the focus was on showcasing individual technical capabilities. At this year’s Beijing Auto Show, it took a step further by displaying complete system-level solutions.
Another Sonavox executive said in an interview that, after Auto Shanghai, the company realized it could “use a better way to present core technologies,” so preparation for booth design and content planning began more than six months in advance.
Sonavox’s technical depth
Supporting Sonavox’s transformation is years of R&D investment.
Annual report data show that in 2025, its R&D spending reached RMB 187 million (USD 27.5 million), accounting for 6.18% of revenue and rising 13.09% year-on-year. It had accumulated 309 patents in China and overseas. At the same time, its testing area expanded from 2,000 square meters to 6,000 square meters, with acoustic lab facilities including an anechoic chamber, a full-vehicle acoustic tuning room, and an immersive audiovisual room. Its tuning expert team has also expanded to 13 people.
The numbers tell only part of the story. More important are the core technical capabilities Sonavox has built through this round of investment.
At the Beijing Auto Show, Sonavox displayed a broad set of technologies. Artificial intelligence-driven multitrack separation was one of the easiest to understand. Most of the world’s music libraries are in stereo format. To deliver spatial audio inside a car, stereo songs must be separated in real time into independent tracks such as vocals, drums, and bass, then mapped to speakers in different cabin positions.
Behind this lies a practical bottleneck in cabin acoustics. Automakers can install more speakers in cars, but music and video content that natively supports immersive or spatial audio remains limited. Hundreds of millions of stereo tracks worldwide still need a conversion solution.
Other vendors usually rely on cloud servers for preprocessing, which cannot respond in real time. Sonavox has taken a harder path, using a proprietary large model deployed on a local in-vehicle platform to complete the process in real time.
Sonavox R&D staff said that, for this year’s Beijing Auto Show, the company restructured the first-generation model deployed last year, significantly expanded its training database, increased model depth and parameter scale, and deployed it on a more powerful system-on-chip for mainstream domain control. Track separation accuracy and audio quality retention both improved.
“We separate each musical element for you frame by frame,” a Sonavox R&D staff member said. “You can bring any stereo song, even an ordinary MP3 file. It does not need to be a lossless source.” Notably, this model is proprietary IP and is not currently open externally.
This technology directly enabled a microphone-free karaoke function. By relying on the AI model to separate vocals and background sound, then layering on an intelligent reverb algorithm, it can provide effects for different singing scenarios, such as a karaoke room, bathroom, or recording studio. 36Kr was told that several automakers are already discussing integration plans for Sonavox’s karaoke algorithm.
The rise of entertainment functions in smart cabins reflects changes in in-car scenarios. Cars are no longer just tools for driving. In new energy vehicles, especially, the cabin has become part of family, social, and entertainment settings. Acoustic systems are naturally moving beyond simple playback.
AI-driven zoned sound field technology is another core Sonavox capability. Zoned sound fields require AI technology and signal processing algorithms to coordinate multiple speaker groups, generating a target sound field in a designated area while using inverse waves to cancel sound energy in other areas. The challenge is not only making sound audible in one position, but also ensuring that other positions hear as little as possible.
Traditional algorithms involve tradeoffs. Some improve isolation but cannot control audio quality. Others preserve audio quality but do not isolate sound well enough. Turning the technology into a product also requires robustness, so the system does not fail when the acoustic transfer function inside the car changes slightly.
Sonavox has addressed this problem. At the show, it introduced a new generation of four-zone sound field technology. Sonavox upgraded its previous single-headrest audio solution into a coordinated 3D near-field acoustic system for the shoulder rest and headrest. Through an original vibration-reducing speaker coordination architecture and waveguide acoustic design, it ensures zoned isolation without sacrificing full-frequency audio quality. This enables independent listening in different parts of the car: the driver can hear navigation, the front passenger can listen to music, and rear passengers can watch cartoons.
For smart cabins, this is a more important change than simply making the audio system louder. It redivides interior space and redefines the experience boundaries for multiple people traveling together.
At the hardware level, Sonavox is also making advances. The third-generation speaker it debuted at this year’s Beijing Auto Show can reportedly guide the propagation path of elastic waves in a controlled way, suppress harmful resonance, and produce an extremely flat and smooth frequency response curve. This may represent a step toward more controllable R&D and production of core sound producing units. Its diamond-diaphragm tweeter has also reached commercial status, filling a gap in domestic high-end in-vehicle tweeter technology.
Another innovation that is easy to overlook but has major engineering value is active speaker vibration cancellation. In-vehicle woofers are installed inside door panels, and high-dynamic low frequencies can easily trigger door-panel resonance, producing unwanted noise and reducing audio quality. This is a longstanding pain point for major OEMs (original equipment manufacturers).
Sonavox has proposed an active control solution that combines speakers with exciters. When the woofer works, the system simultaneously drives a rear exciter to generate a precise counterforce, canceling vibration transmitted to the door panel from the physical source and producing bass without vibrating the door.
Sonavox’s solutions are increasingly oriented toward the whole-vehicle experience. Capabilities displayed on-site, such as active noise cancellation, nonlinear compensation, and in-cabin and external calling, all serve the user’s driving experience. Sonavox R&D staff emphasized that whether the task is reducing vehicle noise or compensating in real time to reduce speaker distortion, “every automaker has this need. It is extremely necessary.”
Together, these technologies point to one trend: automotive acoustics is evolving from a listening-experience feature into a foundational capability of the smart cabin. It now needs to support quietness, privacy, voice interaction, entertainment, and multi-scenario communication.
Globalization, growth, and brand
The competitive landscape facing Sonavox is changing.
The advantages of international brands remain clear. Harman and Bose have spent decades building consumer mindshare, and their logos have become part of the luxury feel of a vehicle. For automakers, choosing a mature international brand can directly confer a premium feel and pricing power familiar to consumers. Sonavox R&D staff also acknowledged that international brands still have clear advantages in branding, consumer awareness, and coverage across both consumer and in-vehicle product categories.
The advantages of domestic suppliers are more apparent at the engineering and supply chain level. Sonavox R&D staff said the mutually reinforcing growth of China’s domestic supply chain gives hardware a cost-performance advantage. Chinese automakers develop quickly, so suppliers must have faster tooling, hardware tuning, and software response capabilities. New energy automakers in particular have stronger demand for smart cabin experiences, and areas such as lighting effects, vibration, 4D and 5D experiences, and AI algorithm adaptation are advancing faster in China.
This is not a simple substitution story. More precisely, international brands still control brand premiums, while domestic suppliers are gaining control over scenario responsiveness and system integration.
Changes on the consumer side are also helping domestic suppliers. Several car owners at the show said they no longer care as much about branding and pay more attention to interactivity and customized experiences. Procurement logic among emerging electric vehicle makers is also changing. They no longer want generic supplier templates. Instead, they want to co-create diversified functions and products with suppliers.
This is also one of the key ideas Sonavox wanted to communicate at this year’s show. According to Sonavox R&D staff, Sonavox’s future focus will be on “acoustics plus.” By definition, this means adding lighting effects, seat-vibration haptics, AI, sensing, spatial computing, and other functions to core acoustics, turning speakers from pure sound-producing units into functional components of the smart cabin.
Invisible acoustics is a concentrated expression of this view. In the past, luxury car audio systems often emphasized their presence through visible speaker grilles, retractable tweeters, and brand logos. Smart EV cabin design places more emphasis on minimalism, light weight, space efficiency, and functional integration. Speakers may become increasingly hidden, even as the sound experience becomes more important.
“Every automaker has requirements for speaker weight, thickness, and installation position. Sometimes they cannot consider speakers first. They have to consider other important parts of the car first,” a Sonavox R&D staff member told 36Kr. Speakers therefore must become increasingly invisible.
Discussing the competitive direction over the next three to five years, Sonavox management’s overall view is that the marginal utility of hardware stacking is diminishing. “We focus more on optimization from the software perspective, the algorithm perspective, and the soft power perspective,” a Sonavox staff member said. Another member of the Sonavox R&D team added that the acoustic foundation of the speaker unit remains the premise, but on top of that, “whoever controls autonomy and AI across the entire chain will see the value-added change.”
This creates new opportunities and problems for suppliers such as Sonavox. The opportunity is that automotive acoustics increasingly requires system solutions, which could amplify domestic suppliers’ advantages in development speed, cost control, and scenario understanding. The problem is that system capabilities must be recognized by automakers, while brand mindshare must be built gradually. In the past, suppliers could hide behind finished vehicles. In the future, the industry will need to know what problems they have solved.
In terms of specific moves, Sonavox will continue advancing technology and commercializing nanomaterials, digital speakers, and multichannel amplifiers. It will also accelerate product-side innovation and cross-sector cooperation in embodied intelligence acoustics, extending automotive-grade acoustic capabilities into more scenarios and seeking a second growth curve.
At the same time, Sonavox will continue binding itself closely with new energy vehicle makers in the Chinese market, participating in the smart cabin industry’s growth while using refined cost control and digital manufacturing to improve delivery quality.
Overseas, it will continue investing in local R&D, manufacturing, and delivery. While defending its advantages in Europe, the US, and China, it will also accelerate expansion into regional markets such as Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia.
From a township factory to a listed company in the top tier of the global automotive acoustics industry, Sonavox has spent 50 years growing. As automotive acoustics becomes more deeply integrated into vehicles, and more invisible within them, the people who have spent years working on sound systems have reached the moment when they need to be seen.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by 36Kr Brand.
Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.81 = USD 1 based on estimates as of May 21, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are presented for ease of reference and may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.