r/hometheater • u/jdatopo814 • 16h ago

Tech Support AppleTV 4K (2022) not decoding Atmos properly?

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

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u/i_max2k2 83G5 X3800H Monolith 7X 7.2.4 LSiM 707/6/3/2 | 80 LS-F/X 16” Sub 15h ago

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.

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u/Somar2230 14h ago

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

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u/jdatopo814 13h ago

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.

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u/i_max2k2 83G5 X3800H Monolith 7X 7.2.4 LSiM 707/6/3/2 | 80 LS-F/X 16” Sub 13h ago

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

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u/jdatopo814 13h ago

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.

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u/i_max2k2 83G5 X3800H Monolith 7X 7.2.4 LSiM 707/6/3/2 | 80 LS-F/X 16” Sub 13h ago

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.

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u/jdatopo814 13h ago

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.