Technical Ramblings of a Mad Man

I jumped on a plane to San Francisco and had the opportunity to see if my hassle updating the firmware on my Studio Wireless solved my problem of the bluetooth connection being dropped whenever the song changed.

What a frustrating experience. My wife bought me a pair of Beats by Dre Studio Wireless headphones, and after using them a couple of times, I noticed that the bluetooth connection would drop periodically. It seemed to primarily occur when going to a new song on my iPhone, and happened all the time when using Amazon music. If I plugged my headphones in, everything worked fine. But the reason I have these headphones is because they are wireless...

After some googling, I thought I found my answer - push a firmware update to my headphones. I followed the steps  and that’s when things went wrong, very wrong. Every time I got to step 2 of 3, I got this wonderful message about an “Interrupted Update”, and asking me to plug my headphones back in. Great I thought, well I can live without the update, and make due with the poor bluetooth connection with my iPhone. 

Except now the headphones wouldn’t even turn on - the five power lights were continuously cycling, and the headphones would not connect via bluetooth or play music when hardwired in. Back to the internet to see what can be done. I saw a number of suggestions, including using a Windows computer (I have a Macbook pro), which seemed ironic, considering I have a pair of Apple made headphones that don’t work well with my Apple phone, and I used an Apple computer to update my Apple headphones, but ran into issues that may potentially be solved by using a Microsoft computer. What the hell is going in Cupertino?

I found another suggestion about keeping the power button down, and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts, I got it to work! Here are the steps for those interested :

1. Power off your headphones by holding power button down for ~ 5 seconds - do this a couple of times (Unplug your phone from the cable)

2. Make sure the Beats Updater is running and annoyingly asking you to plug in your phone

3. Plug your headphones into the cable connected to your computer and hold down the power button on your headphones and DO NOT release the power button during step 2 of 3

4. Once you get to step 3 of 3, you can release the power button, and then wait - eventually it should say the update is complete.

Hold power button during the Step 2 of 3 phase