The Samsung Soundbar is a great multimedia electronic to have in the home. Being made by Samsung, a world-class manufacturer of electronics, you’d all customers expect all customers to have a flawless experience – but this is not the case. There have been multiple instances where people complain about the Soundbar changing sources.
At first, one would consider the cause to be a lack of integration with other TV brands, however, with reports of experiencing the same thing with Samsung TV brands, it’s clear that this is a technical flaw – that will hopefully be completely resolved in future models. If you happen to be facing this problem, don’t worry, we will guide you on how to fix it in consequent writing.
Samsung Soundbar Keeps Changing Sources by Itself: Possible Causes
Samsung started the Soundbar Series in 2008, and since then, we’ve got eight releases, each coming with a significant upgrade. While this is good for the average electronics user, it’s not a good thing for people looking to fix their defective device – it opens the way for several potential causes to explore based on your model. We’ll be highlighting some of them below.
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CEC Settings is Enabled
CEC settings stand for Consumer Electronics Control Settings – its primary function is to allow users to control multiple devices with the same remote. While this may be true, leaving this feature on can become problematic especially if you’re mishandling the remote, or already have a faulty remote.
You want to navigate through to settings and deactivate it. Admittedly, this is one of the minor potential issues that could be wrong with your soundbar.
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Demo Mode is Activated
Having demo mode activated can also make your soundbar automatically switch sources. While still in the settings menu, you want to make sure that it’s deactivated as well.
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Auto Power Link is Turned Off
This situation is often common when you’ve previously paired your soundbar with your phone’s Bluetooth. As the auto power link is turned off, your soundbar won’t come up when you put it on the TV, as such, if you putting it on separately may cause it to search for the Bluetooth device first before linking to your TV.
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Wrong/Faulty HDMI Connection
An HDMI connection is pretty easy to figure out – one end to your soundbar, and the other to the TV. However, if you happen to be using a defective HDMI cable with your system, it can oftentimes go off during transmission causing your soundbar to switch sources.
Also, if you happen to connect both ends to the ports on the soundbar, you’re likely to have a situation where it switches sources irregularly. Meanwhile, this issue is possibly can be as a result of the HDMI control feature being active – try deactivating that before anything else.
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Pending Reset or Outdated Firmware
After an update, it’s expected you allow your soundbar to restart/reset before you continue using it. Failure to do this can often lead to it automatically switching sources. In the same fashion, outdated firmware that’s due for an upgrade may cause a minor system error like auto-switching of sources. Check your firmware update status to see where you are on scheduled updates.
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TV Doesn’t Recognize Soundbar as Default Output
Sometimes, your TV may be the actual cause, and not necessarily the soundbar. You want to make sure the soundbar output is set as your primary/default output device so that anytime you power cycle the TV, it doesn’t disconnect from the soundbar.
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Faulty Soundbar Remote
If you’ve been using your soundbar for a while and happen to be mishandling your remote, it’s likely to cause a fault where it automatically switches your sources even when you don’t press it. In this case, a change of remote is recommended.
Samsung Soundbar Keeps Changing Sources by Itself: How to Fix
Granted that there are several possible causes of this issue, there are also multiple solutions. While that’s the case, some of these solutions are somewhat self-explanatory based on the causes explained above. We will only focus on the ones that require a separate short tutorial to execute.
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Make HDMI the TV Audio Input
Follow this quick guideline to making HDMI your TV audio’s output – it’s more or less the same thing as setting the soundbar as the default HDMI.
- While the soundbar is connected to the TV, press the menu button on the soundbar remote. You should now be seeing the soundbar menu on your TV
- Navigate through to the “Audio” options, and press enter.
- On the sub-settings, navigate through to “TV AU”, and select “HDMI” from the available options
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Check the Soundbar Remote
The Samsung Soundbar is a really sophisticated device, and despite its remote being quite durable, you can still get instances where the remote gets defective such that it sporadically operates itself. While the hard-right solution is to look for a remote replacement, you’ll want to confirm if the issue is actually with the remote.
Take it far away from the soundbar’s typical range, and see if the same issue occurs. Alternatively, you can remove the batteries to see if the problem is temporarily resolved. If that’s the case, you should start considering a remote replacement.
