- An over-the-Air update has “walled” many Samsung HW-Q990D audio bars
- The update is drawn by Samsung
- It is unclear what the affected can do
Owners of Samsung’s five-star sound beam, Samsung HW-Q990D, have a less than five-star experience right now. In what seems to be a defective firmware update, many users report huge problems that effectively transform their Samsung soundbar into slightly more than long black bricks.
If you have a Samsung Soundbar and you are not currently affected by this, it would be wise to turn off its Auto-Update feature (if it has) for the time being. According to Verge, the same problems can affect the Samsung HW-Q800D and HW-S801D-OMEND in significantly smaller numbers so far.
So far, everything had a Samsung spokesman to say about the question: “Samsung is investigating the cause of the problem and taking immediate action to resolve the firmware error.”
It leaves a lot of unanswered questions, so here’s what we know so far.
What goes wrong with Samsung’s soundbar -company?
The firmware update, version 1020.7, has made some sound beams not responding: You can turn them on, but they seem to freeze and cannot be adjusted via Samsung’s Smartthings app. Right now, there is a 31-page (and growing) thread on the Samsung support site, where unhappy owners are also addressing AV-Forums and Reddit.
Mot end of this thread there is a screenshot apparently of a British Samsung moderator who says “We have received feedback from our AV product specialists that this problem is the result of an OTN (over the network) software update … OTN is now suspended and customers who have updated via USB are not affected.”
The post continues: “If your problem is the result of an OTN update, it will be necessary to arrange an engineering inspection and repair to get this resolved.” The customer is then asked to contact Samsung Support directly.
We do not yet know if it is the only solution or whether there is a way for Samsung to use an OTN update to solve the last one. We have followed up with Samsung to request instructions for those affected as soon as possible.
Regardless of the solution, this is a bad look for Samsung: This is a sound bar with a launch price of $ 1,799 / £ 1,699 / AU $ 1,995, not a cheap purchase from a brand any non-name. And as we have seen from the Sonos App disaster, whose problems are not resolved quickly, they can do serious damage to brands among the early adoptors and large consumers they work so hard to attract. Especially with Samsung HW-Q990F Soundbar, replacing Q990D to be exposed to release over the course of weeks …
