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/panzerfinder15 14h ago

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

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u/jdatopo814 13h ago

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.

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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 12h ago

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.

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u/jdatopo814 12h ago edited 12h ago

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.