Losing Sound From Apple TV 4K

Ok, my 2 cents worth. Just putting it out there in case…. HDMI cables? Has anyone/everyone tried replacing with HDMI 2.1 cables. My problem is (was) Apple TV 4K (2021 model) when using Plex to stream shows via a Samsung Q900A soundbar I get audio dropouts. If I put the Apple TV direct into the TV and use the ARC back to the soundbar then it’s fine. Also if I changed the Apple TV to output in 1080P everything would be fine. No one should have to do that though :-). Anyway after a while I decided to replace my HDMI 2.0 cables with HDMI 2.1 and problem is completely gone. It always felt like an issue with the soundbar pushing through 4K content but I never thought about the cables. Anyway, might be worth a try for your guys problems if you haven’t tried already. Cheers 👍🏻

Mea culpa. Maybe. I e upgraded to TV OS 15.2, AND replaced the cable from the Apple TV to the Samsung TV. No more sound drops! I’m betting it was the cable. Although I used an HDMI 2.1 cable from the HDMI eARC out on the TV to the Sonos Arc soundbar, I was using the HDMI cable supplied from Sonos (packaged with the Arc) from the Apple TV to the Samaung. I guess I (foolishly) thought that the cable with the Arc was 2.1 - apparently NOT! Now using two known HDMI 2.1 cables, and no no more sound drops. Maybe it was the OS upgrade, maybe the cable. Doesn’t matter. Seems good now.

Mine works with no downgrades and latest firmware on qn90a and Bose 900 soundbar on e-arc but it isn’t seamless….still has sound drop outs and sometimes I have to restart a movie in Netflix to fix this issue…clunky for an Apple product. It does work much better when you also upgrade Netflix to premium ultra high speed. I have high speed cables but don’t think they say hdmi 2.1….that’s my next thing to try but I doubt it will matter because I get Dolby atmos in all the apps where available…just have to restart movies sometimes multiple times to get the sound to click over from silent.

This is ridiculous for such an expensive set up. I have the 2021 Samsung QN90A and the Sonos sound bar running on optical (waiting for the new arc in January), and I have to keep backing out of video content over and over just to get sound.

Apple, can you please work with Samsung to get this working?? We need you two to talk to each other to resolve this issue.

For all those still having issues, I am curious. Do the sound issues go away if you step it down to 1080p? Keep all sound options at their best, ie Atmos etc and see. If so, I’m confident of a bandwidth issue. For the person that said they have high speed HDMI cables, so did I but the issue only went away when replacing with 2.1 HDMI cables. Mad but true!!! Crazy to need to replace HDMI cables but worked a treat for me.

This is not a “user” issue. This is an Apple issue. It’s not the cables.. it’s not a setting.. it’s either **** hardware or **** software from Apple. We’ve all been bamboozled. I’m about 1 day away from getting rid of about 15 different apple devices and starting over with a different brand. We get locked in to this Apple environment and when something doesn’t work right it screws up the whole system. Apple should stop focusing on making Tv shows and focus on making their device work properly so you can even watch the shows

Went through all the steps with apple support and followed the steps provided here. Clearly apple messed this up because I have 2 other older Apple TV’s in the house and they work. apples brilliant solution send it for repair which will cost $170 which is the same god **** price as the new one. I mean the crookedness is out of hand.

I’ll have to try the nitrate but what’s the point of having an auto format feature that has a hard time knowing which format to switch to?

$180 we spend on a streaming device that Google and Roku make for $50, we pay for the service. Hope they actually read their own forums and stop gouging everyone to either buy a new item or fix it for the same price as the new item.

Thank you again! I’ll change the bit rate see what happens.

Samsung TV QN90A linked via HDMI to Apple TV 4K, Samsung TV to Bose 900 soundbar via e-arc HDMI. Having the same sound cuts as everybody described here. Tried all suggested solutions since the beginning of the thread (cables, firmware updates, 16 bits, etc). The only workaround is to downgrade the sound quality to stereo. At this point, tired of the nonsense. So, I will be returning the Apple TV back to Best Buy as soon as my either Roku or Fire device arrives home. What a shame as I really liked the apple UI and overall feeling.

Yeah that’s my issue, we paid for All the features of Apple TV including Dolby Audio and we have to reduce our audio format just to get sound.

Why pay the premium price tag?

i got the sound to continuously work with reducing it to stereo but Apple needs to patch this otherwise a $50 Roku device is kicking their *** currently. I love Apples UI and it’s simplicity but it’s hard to look over these faults.

I didn’t want to go to stereo or change bit rate and lose quality, but discovered the option to turn off the ‘Change format’, so it sends uncompressed. For me it was defaulted to Dolby 5.1 but now with the option off, sound is steady.

Same issue here as everyone described. It was very sporadic for me. The sound would only cut out when the show first started (all apps Netflix/hbo/Disney etc) so if I restarted the show a few times the sound would come back and stay on. I changed the hdmi cable and did all the restarts which didn’t fix it. Changing to 16bit didn’t fix it either.

I changed the Apple TV audio setting format to ”off” and to Dolby. It seems to work as of right now so hopefully that will fix it.

Just to close my comments here, as I said above nothing worked for me so I ended up returning the Apple TV 4K to Best Buy and took home a Roku Ultra. But as everything, now the Roku does not drop the sound (atmos included) but it is slow in to displaying full definition (about 4 seconds) and what’s worse of all, it has a few ms of audio lag, noticeable on apps like tennis channel. Tried everything on both the Samsung and the Bose bar to remove the lag digitally to no avail. So I guess there is no satisfactory solution out there. I m not willing to take all the garbage advertisements from the Fire cube, so Roku will be for now

If Apple doesn't notice this problem and responds all this talk is pretty worthless. Hopefully with as many posts someone from the mothership is paying attention. Between this sound problem and the out of sync between audio and video I'm pretty much done with this device. I replaced it with my old roku which has another host of problems. I think fire stick is my next try I have a free Chromecast that loses network connectivity regularly and I have to reboot it. All these devices are garbage.

I ended up resolving this issue, unfortunately, it was a $500 solution ($550 now). The HDFury VRROOM fixed this situation for me with a QN90A + Apple TV + Q900A sound bar. The additional upside is I can use multiple 4k120 devices, I have a lot more visibility on the audio/video formats, and also the TV no longer shows that giant volume +/- overlay when I change the volume. Not for everyone, but maybe some cheaper options will come soon.