- A live update has “brick” many bars of its Samsung HW-Q990D
- The update was fired by Samsung
- We do not know what the people concerned can do
The owners of the Samsung five-star soundbar, the Samsung HW-Q990D, currently have an experience of less than five stars. In what seems to be a defective firmware update, many users report huge problems that effectively transform their bars of its Samsung in a little more than long black bricks.
If you have a Samsung sound bar and you are not currently affected by this, it would be wise to deactivate its automatic update function (if it has) for the moment. According to the penis, the same problems can affect the Samsung HW-Q800D and HW-S801D-but in significantly smaller numbers so far.
So far, all that a Samsung spokesman had to say about the question is: “Samsung is investigating the cause of the issue and takes immediate measures to resolve the firmware error.”
This leaves a lot of unanswered questions, so here is what we know so far.
What’s wrong with Samsung’s Soundbar firmware?
The firmware update, version 1020.7, has made certain bars of its completely insensitive: you can activate them, but they seem to freeze and cannot be adjusted via the Samsung SmartThings application. Currently, there is a thread of 31 pages (and growing) on the Samsung support site, the unhappy owners also turning to the AV and Reddit forums.
Towards the end of this thread, there is a screenshot apparently from a British Samsung moderator, which says that “we have received comments from our AV product specialists that this problem is the result of an OTN software update (on the network) … OTN is now suspended and that customers who have updated via USB are not affected.”
The message continues: “If your problem is the result of an OTN update, it will be necessary to organize the inspection and repair of an engineer in order to solve this problem.” The customer is then invited to contact the Samsung support directly.
For the moment, we do not know if it is the only solution, or if there is a way for Samsung to use an OTN update to repair the last. We followed Samsung to request instructions for people affected as soon as possible.
Whatever the solution, it is a bad look for Samsung: this is a soundbar with a launch price of $ 1,799 / £ 1,699 £ / $ 1,995 at, not a cheap purchase from an unnamed brand. And as we have seen from the Sonos application disaster, if the problems are not resolved quickly, they can make serious damage to brands among the first adopters and the big expenditure they work so hard to attract. Especially with the Samsung HW-Q990F sound bar which replaces the Q990D for the release in a few weeks…
