Recently purchased a Samsung MX-T40 Bluetooth speaker. Its a nice box, sounds good, but at the same time has me ask serious questions about activities in software engineering. This device has many capabilities including Bluetooth streaming and USB audio playback. I learn that the USB audio playback has a rather serious omission that really should have kept this thing from getting through system test.
The device has support for two concurrently connected Bluetooth devices (one can play at a time), has a remote control that actually works and has support for playing audio content from a USB source (USB thumb drive). USB audio is the focus on this post.
So I fed it a USB stick with several hundred audio files on it – taken from car, ready to go…
Play sound, sounds good! And the remote works, play things. .
Getting to the issue
Then hit “off”. Come back later and “on”. Select USB and hit play – it starts over at the beginning of the list of songs, sorted alphabetically, so it starts at U2 “40” each time the machine is started up. Side question is why did I have to select USB when it was playing USB when I turned the speaker off?
Keep in mind, it never lost power – it was “off”, but here is no such thing as “off” as the device never lost power. Compare to a car – where the USB playback picks up when you start the car immediately, where it was when you turned the car off.
Amazed that this could happen in a production music appliance, I sought out firmware update for the fix. Surely this is fixed. Found the Samsung download page and downloaded both available firmware updates, and installed.
Survey says: No change in behavior. Disappointing. Instead of “off”, I’ll just leave the machine always on and hit pause. This is probably not great for energy star scores…
Firmware downloads
HMC-TX0WWB-1038.zip for Main IC dated October 13, 2021
HMC-T40WWT-xxxx.zip for Bluetooth IC dated December 14, 2020
Today being February 2023, this means that the device has received all the firmware updates that it likely will receive – and it will never learn to remember it’s position in USB audio playback.
Guess I should get with the youngsters and stream everything all the time.
Joe Nord