Pulse Soundbar+ and AppleTV doesn't play 5.1 sound properly

Patrik Kähäri

Hi.

I have connected my AppleTV 4K to my soundbar using an HDFury Arcana, and all content playing Dolby Atmos works just fine. But much of the content in streaming services (e.g. Netflix, Amazon Prime) is using 5.1 sound. And the soundbar doesn't seem to properly encode and play the sound.

It seems only some of the channels are audible. The background sound is loud and clear, but the spoken dialogue is completely muted.

I can see the encoding of the sound (from the AppleTV) on the Arcana that it's encoded as PCM 5.1. That means that the AppleTV is transmitting contents marked as 5.1 as multichannel PCM and not in a Dolby Digital 5.1.

Is this a bug (feature) of the AppleTV and its inability to properly send out Dolby Digital 5.1 sound? Or is it a problem with my soundbar not properly decoding the 5.1 signal?

 

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  • Official comment
    Mark T.
    Sr. Support Crew Member

    Hi Patrik,

    We are seeing this behavior with Apple TV4k and are able to recreate it in our test environment.

    In some third-party services ( Netflix, Disney+, Prime) the ATV4K outputs PCM Surround instead of Dolby or Dolby Atmos.

    Instead, the ATV4 should be outputting Dolby/Dolby Atmos as Bitstream. This is a bug in the ATV4K firmware and there are no settings to prevent it from occurring.

  • Patrik Kähäri

    Aha. After some additional investigations I discovered the following:

    1. Pulse only supports digital formats (Atmos, DD, DDPlus etc.)

    2. Setting AppleTV to sound output Auto will make AppleTV select the "best" sound quality possible
    And when a Dolby Digital source is played, AppleTV converts the output to multichannel PCM. And the Pulse doesn't really do well with PCM-based formats.

    If I override the sound output of AppleTV and set it to Dolby Digital, it works fine since everything is converted to DD. On the other hand, I lose Atmos playback capability.

    A workaround, for the time being, is to change AppleTV settings whenever I want to enjoy Atmos and keep Dolby Digital as the default setting.

    Any plans on supporting multichannel PCM audio in the Pulse Soundbar+ in the future?

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