Samsung's best Dolby Atmos soundbar is being bricked by a new update – here's what we know so far

An over-the-air update has “bricked” many Samsung HW-Q990D soundbars
The update has been pulled by Samsung
It’s unclear what those affected can do

Owners of Samsung‘s five-star soundbar, the Samsung HW-Q990D, are having a less than five-star experience right now. In what appears to be a faulty firmware update, many users are reporting huge problems that are effectively turning their Samsung soundbars into little more than long black bricks.

If you have a Samsung soundbar and you’re not currently affected by this, it would be wise to turn off its auto-update feature (if it has it) for the time being. According to The Verge, the same issues may be affecting the Samsung HW-Q800D and HW-S801D – albeit in significantly smaller numbers so far.

So far, all a Samsung spokesperson had to say about the issue is: “Samsung is investigating the cause of the issue, and is taking immediate action to resolve the firmware error.”

That leaves a lot of unanswered questions, so here’s what we know so far.

What’s going wrong with Samsung’s soundbar firmware?

The firmware update, version 1020.7, has rendered some soundbars completely unresponsive: you can turn them on, but they appear to freeze and cannot be adjusted via Samsung’s SmartThings app. Right now there’s a 31-page (and growing) thread on the Samsung support site, with unhappy owners also turning to AV forums and Reddit.

Towards the end of that thread there’s a screenshot apparently of a UK Samsung moderator, who says that “we have received feedback from our AV product specialists that this issue is a result of an OTN (Over The Network) software update… the OTN is now suspended, and customers that have updated via USB are not affected.”

The post continues: “if your issue is the result of an OTN update, then it will be necessary to arrange an engineer’s inspection and repair in order to get this resolved.” The customer is then asked to contact Samsung support directly.

As yet we don’t know if that’s the only solution, or if there’s a way for Samsung to use an OTN update to fix the last one. We’ve followed up with Samsung to request instructions for those affected as soon as possible.

Whatever the fix, this is a bad look for Samsung: this is a soundbar with a launch price of $1,799 / £1,699 / AU$1,995, not some cheap buy from a no-name brand. And as we’ve seen from the Sonos app disaster, if issues aren’t resolved quickly they can do serious damage to brands among the early adopters and big spenders they work so hard to attract. Especially with the Samsung HW-Q990F soundbar that replaces the Q990D due for release in a matter of weeks…

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