Chris Welch is a elder reviewer who has worked astatine The Verge since its founding successful 2011. His sum areas see audio (Sonos, Apple, Bose, Sony, etc.), location theater, smartphones, photography, and more.
Samsung’s flagship soundbar, the HW-Q990D, is being rendered useless for immoderate owners aft a faulty firmware update that the institution rolled retired this week. The sheer number of reports connected Samsung’s organization forums, Reddit, and AVSForum corroborate that thing has gone very incorrect pinch the premium Dolby Atmos strategy successful caller days. The rumor isn’t constricted to immoderate circumstantial region, pinch customers successful the United States, Austria, the Philippines, Malaysia, and different countries each sharing successful the frustration.
Customers opportunity the soundbar has gone unresponsive and that nary of the accustomed mill reset methods are working; affected units are besides inaccessible via Samsung’s SmartThings app. The instrumentality powers on, but appears to frost connected the TV eARC input — pinch nary sound output to speak of.
The culprit seems to beryllium the latest firmware release, which is type 1020.7. Many Q990Ds are group to automatically instal caller updates, which has led to wide complaints astir the bad package complete the past respective days. If you’ve sewage a Samsung soundbar, it mightiness beryllium wise to disable automatic updates for the clip being until this business has cleared up. There are scattered reports of the aforesaid bug impacting different Samsung models for illustration the HW-Q800D and HW-S801D, but the bulk of complaints pertain to the Q990D. It’s 1 of the astir well-reviewed soundbars connected the market, truthful this is an unfortunate development.
The Verge has reached retired to Samsung for comment. Apparently immoderate customers person already been instructed to nonstop successful their Q990D hardware for repair. That seems for illustration a worst lawsuit scenario, truthful hopefully Samsung will person an easier, at-home solution erstwhile it realizes the scope of this problem. Can the malfunction beryllium resolved pinch different firmware update successful the coming days? Stay tuned.
Thanks for the tip, Eric.
English (US) · 
Indonesian (ID) ·