I bought my Roku SoundBridge Radio on 5/14/2007 for $300. About a month ago now in the middle of the night it just kept rebooting. It woke me up so I just unplugged it. The next day I go to plug it in again and it refuses to turn on. First thing I did was check the warranty, sadly it was only 1 year long. Next thing I did was check the Roku Forums…

Within 10 seconds it became apparent why the warranty was only 1 year and not 3 or 5. The first 5 threads on the forum were all for dead SoundBridge Radio’s, total view count on these threads is about 50K. The root cause of the problem? Faulty PSU’s which were inadequately designed. What’s amazing is just how many people really truly loved this product, including me. So much so that when they all started failing people tried fixing the units themselves and tried helping others figure out the problems. Some hardcore electrical engineering geekiness too. Hell, one guy even provided a Flickr page showing the fault capacitor. What’s depressing is that this WiFi network audio alarm radio costs a full $300, and yet they couldn’t even spare an extra 20 cents of profit per unit to use higher quality components to ensure customer satisfaction and product longevity. WTF!?

As a professional engineer with many years experience I consider that the Soundbridge radio is a unit where the power supply is bound to fail on a regular basis. Because of the total lack of thermal management which is mainly due to the plastic box and tape around the box the components on the PSU, which is always on, run at an excessive temperature. Back of the envelope calculations suggest the mean time to failure will be in the order of 7 months! Even with the higher rated replacements I have only improved this figure by about a factor of three.

I really loved my Roku, in fact I used to say how it was the one piece of technology in my life that “just worked”. It did exactly what I wanted and worked perfectly, sounded great too. Then this… What a shame. I’m guessing the little Roku’s aren’t as susceptible to this kind of failure, mainly because they’re much simpler in design and don’t require the same power. But I’m sure they’re just as poorly engineered none the less.

With that, let me say, I will never recommend or buy a Roku product again. I highly suggest you don’t either. Even if that $100 Roku Player looks tempting.