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Article prepared for www.audioXpress.com

Asian Voice Coil Manufacturers

A Voice Coil Survey
By Mike Klasco, Menlo Scientific

I am in the mood to talk about voice coils. I managed to break

my collarbone recently and am stuck in bed—this mishap
resulted in my missing the coil winding show (www.coilwind-
US Voice Coil Winders
For decades the US was the key source for high-power
voice coils. Vendors such as Krenz and Acousta-Coil provid-
ing.org). Anyway, Voice Coil has never had an overview article ed cheap but powerful coils. Precision Coil, AV Coils, and a
on Who’s Who in the voice coil industry, so here we are. few other boutique operations serviced the high-power flat
wire coil business. The professional speaker manufacturers
BACKGROUND such as JBL, Altec, and Electro-Voice have traditionally
Over the last 40 years voice coil manufacturing has tran- wound their best coils in-house. The automotive OEM
sitioned gradually from the US, then to Taiwan, and in the business consumes tons of coils.
last few years to mainland China. Significant quantities of
voice coils are still wound outside of China, with the high- MEISEI
est performance coils wound in the US, Italy, and Japan. Many automotive OEM speaker vendors to the US and
The voice coil business in Asia has over a dozen players, Japanese auto transplants (Bose, Panasonic, and Harman)
and positioning has slowly but significantly shifted over have used voice coils from Meisei, located in Danville, Ill.
the years. (Photo 1). The parent company in Japan actually is not in
The last few years have been challenging for both the coil the voice coil business, but fabricates woven and stranded
winders and their customers due to the unstable and increas- flex wire. Meisei is the largest producer of voice coils in
ing prices on copper, the rationing of high performance North America in the 17 years since the Danville plant
polyimides (Kapton, Apical, Uplex), and imposition of opened. Meisei Japan developed an automated system for
RoHS requirements (Reduction of Hazardous Substances, a making voice coils. Meisei has 65 employees working 18
European Union initiative). RoHS will continue to have an automatic production lines. Output peaked at 2.5 million
influence on adhesives, solvents, and soldering. voice coils per month a few years ago.
In the 1960s and early 1970s the Japanese had many
speaker factories that wound their own voice coils, along
with a few high-grade coil winders. Goto Japan was well-
known for excellent wound flat wire coils, yet the Japanese
have only recently been able to offer ultra-high temperature
voice coils and are only now achieving acceptance in the
US and Europe prosound speaker manufacturers. Not too
much is left of the speaker parts business in Japan, nor
even speaker assembly business. Onkyo, Foster, Panasonic,
Pioneer, Aiwa, and the rest long ago moved the bulk of their PHOTO 1: Meisei’s Illinois headquarters.
speaker manufacturing and subcontracting out of Japan.
Only short runs of premium speaker products remain. PRECISION ECONOWIND
Most Japanese speaker factories shifted production to A few years ago, in a survey for the leading magnet wire
Taiwan speaker parts factories in the late 1970s and 1980s. manufacturer, we reported that Precision Econowind in
Foster, Pioneer, and Panasonic Japanese/Taiwan transplants Florida made 700,000 coils per month, with 200 people.
became the base for Taiwanese speaker technology. Now Jon Van Rhee of Precision says they currently have
about 65 employees in Florida, making approximately
Voice Coil 2008 1
 200,000 coils per month. All of their OEM automotive
business is now wound in China, at Po Yun. Most of what
they wind in Florida now are high temperature automotive
aftermarket and pro audio coils (Photo 2).
Many of the automotive aftermarket coils are flat alumi-
num wire in 4- and 8-layer dual, quad, and parallel dual
configurations with diam-
eters ranging from 2″ to
8″. Precision Econowind
makes many high-temp
flat and round wire coils
and sends them to China
to be built into high- PHOTO 3: Po Yun factory.
performance subwoofers,
which then are sent back
to the US. The pro-sound
coils are mostly high-
temperature edge-wound
PHOTO 2: Custom coils from Precision
Econowind.
coils for companies in the
US, Canada, and South
America, although some are 6, 8, and 10 layers of flat alu-
minum wire.
Some quantities of coil manufacturing for the US OEM
autosound business is moving to China. Specifically, both
Ford and GM have shifted a significant quantity of their
speakers sourced from US vendors to China in the last year PHOTO 4: Magnifying inspection at Po Yun.
or two.

Asian Voice Coil Winders

The following is a brief overview of ten of Asia’s Voice
Coil winders. These are not in any specific order, but rather
grouped by where the firm’s management originated. A few
of these vendors are “converters” and sell coated bobbin
materials, coated magnet wire, collar materials, adhesives,
and such to both other independent coil winders and speaker
manufacturers that wind their own coils.

Taiwanese Transplants in China

PO YUN PHOTO 5: Po Yun production.
Po Yun, a Taiwan run business, is one of the two top
contenders in the Asian voice coil business. Po Yun (Photos A-TON Industrial Co., Ltd.
3-5) was established in 1979 in Taiwan and focused on ser- A-TON achieved success by establishing itself in Thailand
vicing Japanese speaker brands, especially Panasonic. Today and promoted flat wire coils. When the rest of the Taiwanese
Po Yun still attracts a large share of Panasonic’s business. Po speaker industry did not follow to Thailand, A-TON
Yun’s other key customers are Harman, Pioneer, and Philips. expanded to South China with a joint venture (First Sail).
The company shifted its manufacturing to South China, and A-TON received notoriety when it started by specializing in
more recently established a factory in Shanghai. relatively low-cost flat wire voice coils. While the US speaker
I profiled Po Yun for Voice Coil five years ago, and since industry initially had trouble adjusting to the metric sizes,
then Po Yun has expanded from two factories with 700 US designers warmed to this, especially for tweeters. A-TON
workers to four factories with 2000 workers. One factory has been strictly a coil winder, not a converter or wire house.
is in Shanghai to serve that expanding market, another in Manufacturing is expanding to A-TON’s Chinese operations
South China is specifically for China non-export products in South China and Shanghai. A-TON’s sister operation is
(to accommodate restrictions and regulations that differ in P-Audio, a prosound speaker manufacturer.
China for export and domestic consumption of local produc-
tion). The Xiamen China factory mostly supplies the nearby SHU KAE
Panasonic speaker factory. Shu Kae was established in Taiwan in 1977. They are still
a strong contender and one of the top voice coil winding
2 Voice Coil 2008 www.audioXpress .com
operations. Like most of the other Taiwan voice coil vendors, scale, results in low prices.
what was once a big operation in Taiwan is now only retained Tianle is a sleeping giant in the voice coil industry. The
for development and short production runs. The head office company has a flat wire winding machine but was not yet using
in Taiwan now has a staff of only 30 and produces formed it when I visited. The local government has sponsored a huge
plastic domes for headphones, mikes, tweeter diaphragms, development project and has built a large industrial park for
and dust caps. The Taiwan voice coil winding operation Tianle, moving from their original site nearby. Tianle is in the
(near the diaphragm operation and headquarters) was estab- general region of Ningbo, south of Shanghai (Photo 6).
lished in 1982 and now also has a staff of only 30.
Shu Kae expanded vertically with slitting, die cutting, PHOTO 6: Tianle’s home base.
and coating bobbins, but also processes its own magnet wire
insulation and outer bond coat, establishing a magnet wire
insulation and outerbond coating operation in 1987. Many
independent coil winders use Shu-Kae as their converter
for adhesive-coated bobbin materials as well as their self-
bonding magnet wire.
Shu Kae came to China late, establishing its first plant in
Xiamen in 1997. A staff of 250 workers produces 3 million
coils per month. A year later the company established anoth-
er voice coil winding plant in Shenzhen, also with a staff of
about 250 and production of 3 million coils per month.
Tianjin Yameiya Electroacoustic
KCT (Kaohsiung Chi-Tien) The founders of Tianle left and moved to a nearby town,
KCT, a Taiwan managed operation, is both a voice coil focusing on voice coils, diaphragms, dampers (spiders), and
winder as well as a voice coil materials converter supplier. other speaker parts. They offer a wide range of coils, includ-
Many types of bobbin materials, collar materials, coating, ing medium temperature, CCA wire, and so on. As with
and spiral bobbin winding are done in-house. My first visit Tianle, a “cost-down” resource, assuming the logistics of hav-
to KCT occurred many years ago when they were originally ing a vendor in Tianjin, is workable.
located in Koushung in south Taiwan. KCT does some busi-
ness with the big Japanese factories such as JVC, Panasonic, Audio Star (HuiZhou AudioStar Electronics Co.)
Pioneer, and so on. Founded in 1999, this Chinese operation is run by a
KCT was one of the first Taiwan factories to export bobbin sophisticated engineer-owner. Audio Star (Photo 7) is a rela-
materials, wire, and converted processed voice coil materials tively new entry and a medium size voice coil winder offering
to Chinese speaker factories. Today their Taiwan factory is specialty products such as high-power voice coils (up to 6″
down to 120 staff total. In 1994 they set up their factory in diameter!) and also provides commodity voice coils to service
China, another small operation, with 200 workers. its customers’ requirements. Perhaps in quantity they rank #6
with about 15 million coils per year, but they lead the Asian
Chen Hong (Taiwan) market in high-temperature performance flat wire coils.
For high-quality and high-temperature coils from Asia, Mr. Liu Hui Min—who was a senior manager and engi-
you might consider a specialist such as Chen Hong, still neer in Gold Peak’s Celestion speaker company ten years
based in Taiwan. They have supplied RCF (Italy), Focal
(France), and Selenium (Brazil), and other high-end brands
throughout the world with excellent compression driver flat
wire voice coils. Over the last ten years they have specialized
essentially into flat wire voice coils for high-grade and profes-
sional loudspeakers.

Home-Grown Chinese
Zhejiang Tianle Group
Tianle—a giant Chinese speaker parts supplier with over
3000 workers—is a huge manufacturer of cones, frames,
and magnetic structures, but voice coils are a smaller part
of the business. Tianle was started as a school with a small
manufacturing operation. The school separated from the
manufacturing during a company restructuring. On my last
visit a couple years ago, I saw about 100 workers making
voice coils of low and medium power. Tianle’s mentality is PHOTO 7: A sample of Audio Star’s coil products.
to use the “cost down” materials, which, coupled with their
Voice Coil 2008 3
 ago—is the general manager of Audio Star. Celestion is a plant Chaw Maw in Dongguan has an affiliated operation
prosound speaker brand in England. Its Chinese factory (Long Run Voice Coil Manufactory). GGEC and Meiloon
is not far from Audio Star and now Celestion is also an also have (last time I visited, anyway) their own in-house coil
important customer of Audio Star. Audio Star also sup- winding to satisfy some share of their requirements. I expect
plies voice coils with heat–resistant, light weight and high the voice coil industry to continue to evolve, with more
power handling to Peavey, Wharfedale (IAG Group), and advanced technology and production methods continuing
another very famous pro-audio speaker company I know to migrate to Asia, and China, in particular. VC
of that does not want its name mentioned.
Audio Star passed ISO/TS 16949:2002 quality sys- Mike Klasco is the president of Menlo Scientific Ltd. in
tem certification in 2005. More recently, the company Richmond, Calif., a consulting firm to the loudspeaker
introduced automated production and test systems. By industry. He is the organizer of the Loudspeaker University
virtue of technology, equipment, and process improve- seminars for speaker engineers. Mike contributes frequently
ments, the voice coil quality and consistency is very good to Voice Coil. He specializes in materials and fabrication
and cost remains competitive. Audio Star’s raw material techniques to enhance speaker performance. He can be
is imported chiefly from Denmark, UK, US, Japan, and reached at [email protected].
Germany and are RoHS compliant.

Japanese Transplants
Goto Electronic
Established in Japan in the early 1960s, Goto opened its
first Chinese branch in Shanghai in 1980 and a Mexican
operation in the mid 1980s. Goto in South China was estab-
lished in 2001, bringing the cost of Goto’s high-performance
flat and square wire and high-temperature coils down a bit
and making them more accessible to Chinese speaker fac-
tories. Goto is perhaps most famous for its flat wire woofer
coils, wound onto Toray Til fiberglass epoxy bobbins.

Shanghai Nix
The last time I visited this factory, it was right in the
center of Shanghai in a narrow alley. Now they also have a
factory in Shuzhou (about an hour drive inland). Shanghai
Nix is a joint venture with Japanese technology started in
1991 between Nikkei Japan and Shanghai Feilo. Feilo was
one of the first speaker manufacturers in China (state run)
and went public years ago and is now mostly in real estate.
Shanghai Nix covers 10,000m2 of production area with a
staff of 750 (total), and annual production of 50 million
voice coils—both Shanghai and Shuzhou factories.
Shanghai Nix produces low-end voice coils with “Lock”
lower temperature adhesives (130° C) but also some SV
medium temperature and now some high-temperature coils.
Key Nix customers are Sony, JVC (Victor), Onkyo, and
various Chinese brands. They have also supplied SEAS and
Vifa for less expensive models for this Scandinavian brand
for speakers produced by DST (Danish Sound Technology)
in China.

CONCLUSION
I estimate that these operations account for 75% of the
independent Asian voice coil vendor business. Of course,
there are another dozen vertical speaker manufacturers which
wind some of their own coils and a couple are noteworthy.
For example, Dai-Ichi in Manila has a joint venture with AV
Coils of San Diego for manufacture of ultra-high tempera-
ture flat wire voice coils. Dai-Ichi also winds some portion
of its medium-grade coils but also outsources. Taiwan trans-
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