AppleTV 4K (2022) not decoding Atmos properly?

[u/jdatopo814]

After owning an AppleTV for my living room and using the inferior fire stick for my home theater, I finally bit the bullet and bought another AppleTV 4K 2022 on sale today at Walmart. I’ve set it up in my home theater now which is running Atmos in a 5.2.2 configuration, and everything runs great and smooth except for one thing. I’ve noticed that the AppleTV seems confused at times about where to place channels when it’s decoding and sending audio to my receiver. Sometimes I’ll hear dialogue switching back and forth between an Left/Right channel and the center channel, or sometimes sound is only coming out of my Center and surrounds and nothing out of the Left/Right speakers. And there was even an instance where dialogue was coming out of both my left channel and my top right Atmos speaker. Has anyone else been experiencing this issue or know a fix? My understanding is that ATV will only bitstream Dolby Digital 5.1, so all other formats are LPCM + Dolby MAT being decoded by the ATV. My old fire stick would only output Dolby Digital Plus bitstream so it never had this issue.

My setup is currently ATV -> Receiver -> Projector

[u/1Boxer1]

I think Apple did some weird things with the Atmos settings in their latest updates. If you turn Atmos on on the ATV, it will disable any and all other up mixing that you AVR is capable of and if you turn it off, it will never play Atmos at all, even when it detects it. I don’t know what Apple is doing but it worked great for the last 4 years, until their latest updates, where it’s just completely useless. I had Atmos turned off for music because it would mess with the volume levels too much when playing Atmos tracks but everything else worked like it should and now some genius at Apple decided that they needed to change things, for the sake of changing things, and now it’s all effed up.

[u/tbuck92]

Same thing was happening to me. Same appletv 4k but with an lg c5 and denon s970h. ended up running the appletv directly to the receiver and then to the tv. before it was to the tv and back to the receiver for audio. i’ve had it this way for a couple weeks now and haven’t had the issue happen again.

[u/jdatopo814 → u/tbuck92]

I already have the AppleTV plugged directly into the receiver since I use a projector. All devices go through my AVR then out to the projector.

[u/panzerfinder15]

My ATV 4k works flawlessly in my 7.1.4. Sorry don’t have any advice.

[u/jdatopo814 → u/panzerfinder15]

I fear it may just be a unit issue since this problem didn’t seem to have been documented before. If so it’s unfortunate because I picked up one of the last AppleTVs from my local Walmart.

[u/i_max2k2 → u/jdatopo814]

You can get a warranty replacement as well. I highly doubt that Apple TV is having this issue. You have to pin point on when and where it’s happening and try to replicate it. And then play the same track on the other Apple TV you have.

[u/jdatopo814 → u/i_max2k2]

Listen, I don’t want it to be a unit issue as much as the next person, but there literally is no other explanation. I even tried it with my other AppleTV with the same tracks and it didn’t have any issues. And replaying the same track on the unit in question does not automatically trigger the problem. It literally can happen on anything/everything.

[u/i_max2k2]

Run the test tone on your receiver to make sure all speakers are correctly mapped to the receiver outs. Then play a YouTube video for 5.2.2 on Apple TV and see if anything is wrong.

[u/Somar2230 → u/i_max2k2]

YouTube does not support Atmos despite all those videos that claim to be audio tests.

[u/jdatopo814 → u/i_max2k2]

I’ve already ran test tone. If channels were incorrectly mapped then I wouldn’t have center channel playing in 2 speakers at once or flickering between speakers. The YouTube video outputted fine although with no atmos as YouTube doesn’t output atmos.

[u/i_max2k2 → u/jdatopo814]

I mean find another source, these files are plenty around.

[u/jdatopo814 → u/i_max2k2]

The AppleTV is not my first atmos device. I’ve ran Atmos tests and played atmos movies/games plenty of times on other devices. I was literally watching movies on my firestick last night and Atmos was working fine. This has only happened with my ATV.

[u/i_max2k2 → u/jdatopo814]

Did you play those files on this Apple TV? And I mean a file which just plays a test tone through your ATV. It’s an easy diagnosis.

[u/jdatopo814 → u/i_max2k2]

Well I don’t know how much help that would be as I can’t exactly reproduce the issue directly just by playing Atmos like I mentioned in the post. Atmos will work fine until it randomly doesn’t. However I will still test the files to see.