Can a firmware update change how my headphones sound?

Having been waist-deep in audio for the past decade and a half, I’ve heard many reports about firmware updates “breaking” or otherwise altering the performance of headphones and speakers. But is it really happening? Or is it something else going on?

Most people just want their headphones to perform a singular task, in the same way, every day — so the idea that your music could sound different with no warning is probably something you didn’t want me to put in your head. Though most people may not bemoan a useful new feature, I can’t think of a single person that wants to deal with the unexpected; less with bricked headphones or a pair of earbuds with noticeably worse performance.

How can a firmware update change how something sounds?

The short answer is that yes, a firmware update can absolutely change how your headphones or earphones sound. Even as I’m sitting here writing this, I’m waiting on a firmware update to a set of previously-reviewed headphones that the company promises will improve the sound. It does happen — but it’s fairly rare.

Most of the ways an update could change things have nothing to do with some nerd altering tunings from afar. In general, the things we’ve seen that result in performance changes are usually tweaks or “fixes” for things the manufacturer believes should be messed with. For example, anything that detects a user wearing the product, or relies on a sensor to work. When these things don’t work right, it’s fairly common for features that rely on them to affect performance in ways that you’re not used to.

Code updates seldom break something completely, and it’s newsworthy when that happens. For example, when a company decides to stop supporting completely functional devices, or when an app update completely wrecks how people use their products and there’s no way to revert it. Most of the time, problems with a firmware update can either be fixed by a reinstall or a reset. But a cursory look at Reddit also shows some rather unfortunate happenstances with headsets that require external support.

When performance deviates from what’s expected, users are quick to complain and companies are quick to fix the situation. Which is good: users aren’t simply averse to change, they have to use the products they buy every day. Audio companies know that people are extremely resistant to adjusting to new behaviors out of the things they own, so there’s a sort of self-restraint when making decisions that could impact that.

Unfortunately, companies aren’t always forthcoming about every single little detail packed into a firmware update. But that usually isn’t because they don’t want you to know: it’s just that the people tasked with dealing with the public might have an enormously difficult time finding the right information to report, as many update changelogs simply aren’t public-facing or verbose. Also, sometimes users may read a bit too much into changelogs for things that aren’t really an issue. Ask me how I know.

Some examples of firmware update failures

But sometimes, there are some notable bugs that make it to production. A tweak to what values are recorded by what sensors can make a certain feature trigger — or not — thereby altering the behavior of certain products. If something is too complicated or there’s a bug, sometimes bizarre errors crop up. Here are some examples of catastrophic firmware updates I’ve run into over the last ten years:

1. A light or skin-detection sensor thinks that a product isn’t on a human. This, in turn, automatically shuts off the following features to prevent battery drain when not in use:
   1. ANC disabled.
   2. Equalization features disabled.
   3. The product disconnects after the default timeout every time, mid-song.
2. Upon taking a call, a product would permanently enable Sidetone even after the call ends. Restart didn’t help.
3. Default EQ overwritten by app, no option to return original tuning without a factory data reset.
4. A feature that should have been enabled by default wasn’t, and an update fixes it — causing performance to change.
5. Updates caused the left channel to play on both sides of the product, but no right-channel audio.
6. The product is outside of its planned life. An update bricks it.
7. A system meant to detect a poor fit and change frequency response to compensate erroneously reports a bad fit — thereby changing the sound.
8. Gaming headset software blue-screens and bricks a Windows computer (Sorry, Sam).

With the above issues, I’m not putting any one company on blast (outside of Spotify and Sonos) because most companies run into this after a while. It’s insanely hard to make good audio products at scale, and when you add firmware into the mix, the task becomes more complex. Sometimes, it’s not even the company’s fault that something goes wrong because there are hundreds of thousands of users all putting their gadgets through situations the developers didn’t account for, like showering with their product. But pretty much every major audio company has shipped a product with issues that needed to be fixed post-launch; Apple, Bose, Sony, the list goes on — there are none perfect among us. Cut ’em a bit of slack; unless they really screw things up for a long period of time, anything that goes wrong can be fixed.

How firmware updates impact headphone reviews

Most Bluetooth headphones are generally being asked to do more and more each year. There’s a lot that can go wrong nowadays! More complicated devices mean more opportunities for something to perform unexpectedly. It’s why we update our reviews several times a year, as there are all sorts of things that can happen to change a product’s place in the world. Firmware updates are an added wrinkle that makes any review incomplete until the product goes off the market. If a review doesn’t reflect the current performance of a product, how useful is that review?

When we catch wind of a firmware update, if it’s a relatively popular device, we’ll re-test the headphones or earbuds as time allows. If nothing much changed, then you won’t see much of a difference in the review. However, there are cases where the firmware updates have broken things or changed performance. If we find any of this, we reach out to the company, then update if the issue isn’t resolved. Companies are quick to fix problems like these, so in almost every instance where we’ve reported a bug or asked about something that didn’t make sense: the end users never had to deal with the issues we found… so we had little to write about even though we wanted to.

Sometimes we also receive units ahead of release that measure with connection issues, absurd tunings, or some distortion that gets better once firmware version 1.0.0 hits. When you’re one of the first people who get their hands on something off the production line, you’re also often the first person to notice something that wasn’t meant to be released. We have absolutely missed internal deadlines waiting for production firmware before, and while it’s annoying: we do it so that our articles are as relevant to consumers as possible. It can get very confusing when our reviews change over time, and that bears out every now and again.

Should you be worried about firmware updates breaking ANC?

Though many may claim that ANC gets affected by firmware, I’ve never seen it actually perform significantly worse. I have, however, seen the logic behind headphones’ sensors change, leading to weird behavior.

Sometimes a firmware update can fail, and leave some users with allegedly poorer performance like what happened with the Bose QuietComfort 35 II. I say “allegedly” because every time I’ve tried to investigate issues like these, I’ve come up empty-handed, as have the companies that are supposedly affected. The closest I’ve come to replicating something like this is a botched firmware update causing problems with sensors triggering (or not) — not poorer performance. Chances are much higher that your ANC headphones aren’t performing worse after an update, but something else happened near the same time that impacted performance, like your ear pads getting dislodged.

Back when the Beats Fit Pro was first released, reviewers had an interestingly difficult time measuring the ANC performance because the sensors were more advanced than a simple light sensor — you needed actual flesh in order to trigger the photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor. Despite the fact that there was a slider in iOS to disable the ear-detect setting to toggle ANC in iOS, that didn’t actually work! If the sensor didn’t trigger due to simply just not having the housings rammed into the side of your ear, the earbuds’ ANC or fit-detect wouldn’t work. Most people would never know that something was amiss because the sensor would work for most people, but it did make measuring these earbuds a colossal pain with synthetic robot ears. After buying an additional unit and striking out again, we published our review noting the difficulty. Sometime later, a bugfix update solved this issue, and we were finally able to measure more believable results with the test head. There were a few reports of weak ANC when the earbuds first launched, and I suspect that this bug had a hand in it.

What does this mean for you?

Firmware updates that result in something changing for you can happen, but they’re very rare. When that actually happens, it’s most often the result of a fix that addressed a different issue with the headphones causing strange behavior. It may make my life a bit more complicated, but it shouldn’t affect many people who are simply looking to listen to music.

Should you run into something changing with your headphones after a firmware update, check to see if you haven’t dislodged an ear pad or ear tip, had anything change with the fit, or something isn’t perfect. There’s all sorts of things — including the placebo effect — that can mess with your brain’s interpretation of sound. Your headphones are likely fine unless they’re bricked.

Try to see if you can re-create the issue with different devices, or with a restart. For true wireless earbuds, attempt to reconnect the units completely before submitting a complaint. But if you do run into catastrophic failures, you can always exercise that warranty.