Netflix Dolby Atmos problems with new Apple TV 4k

I've had Atmos issues in Netflix with the following setup:

• Apple TV 4K 2ᴺᴰ gen
• tvOS 15.3
• LG SL8Y soundbar
• Mecer UHD monitor
• ATV -> Soundbar -> Monitor (ARC, EDID 2.0)

Software for all devices is the latest available for each.

In Netflix, I started watching The Adam Project yesterday and the soundbar repeatedly switched in and out of Atmos, causing sound to drop out every second i.e. audio for 1 second, no audio for 1 second, audio for 1 second, no audio for 1 second ... endlessly. This happened with any Atmos title in the Netflix app.

I restarted all devices, no change. Switched 'Audio Format > Change Format' to 'On' to force Dolby 5.1, audio issues gone.

Switched 'Audio Format > Change Format' to 'Off' to allow Atmos again, the issue returns.

In the Amazon Prime app, launched The Tomorrow War and the soundbar switched to Atmos, without any audio issues.

Back to Netflix, launched The Adam Project again and the soundbar switched to Atmos, and the audio issues are now gone.

All signs point to software for me ...

Have been following this thread for a few months (also having the popping/muting issue with gen 2 ATV4k, but not gen 1).

Throwing this out there to see if others are interested in testing a theory. Prior to watching Atmos content, try doing a full restart on the unit (not just the Siri remote power button, which only puts unit to sleep). Either select "restart" via the System menu, unplug power, or hold down the "back" and "TV" button on the Siri remote for a few seconds. This seems to eliminate the issue for me, or at least greatly reduce the frequency of occurrence.

Completely unacceptable this issue continues to plague Apple TV Atmos users for this long. Apple will not even respond any longer to my nearly 4-month-old support ticket and requests for status updates.

I'm made of the earlier posts on this thread and came back to see if there was a fix. I've been using the built-in GoogleTV apps on my Sony TV and Atmos works perfectly over eARC. However, I prefer the AppleTV's UI so I just updated my AppleTV 4K Gen 2 to 15.4 and tried again. That update had no effect on the problem, and possibly made it worse. The AppleTV is connected to the Media Player input on my Marantz 8500HA (it's an HDMI 2.1 input) and playing Atmos Music from Apple Music pretty much doesn't work at all anymore. It glitches after a few seconds. If I reboot the box, I can watch an Atmos show for a bit, but it usually glitches within 20 minutes and then becomes unwatchable.

Since I've been enjoying Atmos Music and the AppleTV is the only way to get it, I swapped the box for my Gen 1 Apple TV. That's a nuisance because I have to log back into all of the apps that timed out while it was unplugged -- but it plays Atmos Music perfectly. It also has Dolby Vision, which I didn't remember it having (thought that was a Gen-2 feature). The only downside is that it's noticeably slower than the Gen 2, especially when scrolling around, and doesn't have the new remote (but I use my TV remote anyway which is actually better than even the new AppleTV remote).

I hope Apple gets their act together and fixes this problem, or if it turns out to be a hardware issue, somehow makes us early adopters whole (I bought it the week it came out). At the moment it's useless.

LINGERING AT THE BOTTOM of any press release are the people in the know... Here you'll see the names of the Apple TV PRs. Bernadette and Christine are the people that know how to get things moving when a problem becomes an embarrassment. I emailed them on Friday. They haven't replied... but if a few more of you email them... silence will no longer be an option.

(I totally agree... a person answering tech calls isn't going to have a clue about future software updates.)

Mentioned before: Am a filmmaker and Atmos creator. None of this makes any sense to us... In many ways, Dolby Vision is much more complex and data intensive and it's working fine. Would make more sense for that not to work. And Dolby Atmos used to be faultless on Apple TV.

We contacted the Atmos product manager at Dolby and he says Apple is aware. It's an awful look for Apple, that the excellent and widely-promoted Dolby Atmos technology just isn't working on their hardware, and ruining the experience.

It's unfair to viewers, creators, and of course, Dolby.

Of course it isn’t a solution, but it is likely as close as we will get, unless you want to add disabling Atmos, since Apple apparently has no intention of actually fixing the problem. This issue has been present the day the ATV4K Gen 2 was released, though it got significantly worse with the release of tvOS 15.x.

A lot of people here believe that an Apple product can’t possibly have such a major defect. Look at all the posts where people replaced their HDMI cables, believing that a cheap or faulty HDMI cable could specifically target Atmos audio, while leaving other audio formats and video completely free of artifacts. That just defies logic.

Are you watching Drive to Survive? Drive to Survive at 4K 50Hz is the only meaningful test I have found as it produces consistent Atmos dropouts due to its high bandwidth. If you watch other shows that are 4K 24Hz (pretty much all other shows), the dropouts are too infrequent and random to come to any definitive conclusions. I have gone many hours with some shows -- even entire seasons -- without a dropout.

You need to test with Drive to Survive. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

I disagree 200%!

Do you have a better explanation for why Drive to Survive has far more dropouts than other programs? Can you explain why Drive to Survive forced to 1080p 50Hz has no dropouts? Have you tested the Atmos issue on both Wi-Fi and Ethernet? Apparently not.

Your example of Gen 1 units now having the Atmos problem doesn't support your statement that my test findings do not support my conclusions. I have stated numerous times that tvOS 15.x is an order of magnitude worse than tvOS 14.x on the Gen 2. This proves that S/W is a factor. I have even gone on to say that I believe the Atmos problem should be fixable or at least mitigated in S/W, for this very reason. Though I haven't seen enough credible reports to believe there is a problem on Gen 1 units with tvOS 15.4, I left mine on 15.3, just in case. It is very possible that tvOS 15.4 was a sufficient regression to also affect Gen 1 units. Nothing I have said suggests this couldn't happen.

If you are referring to my belief that the root cause is a timing or other error in the creation of the MAT 2.0, I didn't say that my observations supported that belief. A belief doesn't require proof. However, I have provided anecdotal evidence for why I believe this in prior posts, but the gist is that encoding is more resource hungry than decoding, and no other audio formats have any issue. It is also more likely the thing that is different about Atmos than non-Atmos audio, and that is the creation of the MAT 2.0 Atmos metadata stream that accompanies the LPCM 5.1 stream out of the ATV4K.

My conclusion that higher bandwidth video is a trigger for the Atmos problem is reasonable and supported by the evidence. I sent a letter to Ara Derderian, cohost of the HT Guys podcast. He replied that he had never noticed the Atmos issue on his Gen 2. However, when he played an episode of Drive to Survive as I suggested, he experienced the problem within the first 10 minutes. Ara reads my email and discusses the Atmos issue in this week's episode, #1051, if anyone is interested. I know of at least one other person who also tested Drive to Survive on both Wi-Fi and Ethernet, and also found far fewer dropouts on Wi-Fi. I haven't previously discussed why that would be the case, but my guess is that the Ethernet connection requires more processor overhead than the Wi-Fi, leaving fewer resources to the MAT 2.0 stream.

I was just trying to share what I believe are important observations regarding the Atmos problem, and some potential workarounds that I have not seen posted elsewhere. I trust that other readers will separate the wheat from the chaff. As an engineer I do a lot of troubleshooting, and part of that process is making educated guesses, some of which are wrong. I am used to rational arguments or test data to prove me wrong, not knee-jerk criticisms as is all too common in public forums, and I just had to vent. I put some thought and effort into getting this far with the Atmos problem, mostly for the fun and challenge of it, but also with the naive hope that some helpful information might trickle up (or down) to the engineers at Apple who can fix this. Though I would like to see this issue fixed, I have a few other streamers at my disposal that do not have an issue.

It looks like there was a software update today for the AppleTV 4K: I was on 15.4.1 and now I'm on 15.5. I figured I'd take a chance and see if Apple fixed the problem. The show we watched tonight was "Hanna" on Prime Video but it was 5.1 and I thought it sounded better and more solid than I remember. Afterwards, I played some of "Encanto" from Disney+ in Atmos and that worked fine. I also watched a few minutes of a 4k Dolby Vision+Atmos movie in my AppleTV library and that worked well -- no dropouts. Finally, I tried a bit of Netflix Atmos content and that was also fine. I didn't get a full hour of Atmos content in, but I'm cautiously optimistic since this is a major version jump. Fingers crossed.

Your Gen 2 replacement will have the same problem. I have suggested several workarounds, such as using a Wi-Fi connection (seems to reduce dropout frequency significantly), and forcing the output to 1080p, which depending on your seating distance, TV 4K upscaling quality, etc., may be the best option and should completely eliminate the dropouts. I go into a lot more detail in recent posts.

You should also keep your replacement on tvOS 14.7 (if that is what it currently ships with), if you can deal with Apple's constant nagging to update. I found 15.x had an order of magnitude more dropouts than 14.x. My Gen 1 also never had any Atmos dropouts, even when I tested with DtS.

Interesting. I was never able to make it through an episode of DtS without dropouts until I tested it with the ATV4K output set to 1080p. I only had 1 dropout on DtS at 4K 50Hz on Wi-Fi, and countless dropouts on 4K 50Hz DtS wired.

If DtS at 4K 50Hz has the most dropouts, and all other 4K 24Hz content has significantly fewer dropouts, it seems reasonable that a 1080p 24Hz or 50Hz stream, which is lower bandwidth than 4K content, would have very few or no dropouts. I don't believe there is anything inherently different between these test cases other than video bandwidth.

I was very skeptical of the reports that a Wi-Fi connection had significantly fewer dropouts than wired, so I didn't test that until recently. To my surprise, I found that DtS had significantly fewer dropouts on Wi-Fi. I can't argue with the results. Fozzy1969 on this thread tested this for himself and came to the same conclusion, and I know of others who had similar results.

Perhaps there are other variables in play that affect the test results, such as performing a System Restart before each test.

Did you skip my posts? TLDR: Video bandwidth is the trigger. Different shows and streaming services use different amounts of bandwidth. Even on Netflix, DtS has the most dropouts due to it being 50Hz, while forcing it to 1080p eliminates the dropouts. Outside of DtS, the dropouts are too random to come to meaningful conclusions. Some shows have had no dropouts for many hours/episodes. I have had lots of dropouts on ATV+. There is no longer anything unique about Netflix to cause dropouts.

seems to be really a problem of handling data via ethernet. Switched today to wifi and watched more than 4 episodes of dts without any dropout. Still watching other atmos content, no issue so far.

I can confirm that TVOS 16 has solved stuttering problems with Atmos.

My setup:

LG C9 with SN11RG plug in the e-ARC hdmi port.

Hi All,

I don’t think it’s the cables. I believe it happens because the AppleTV 4K has problem supporting Atmos with Dolby Vision at 60Hz. Reduced the Dolby FPS to 50 Hz and it went away. I need more tests to verify though. Very sad that Apple let things come to this. It ruined my whole viewing experience on Netflix.

I also have audio issues when I listen to Atmos programs on Netflix or the Apple TV app with my Apple TV 4K connected to my Denon AVR 6700h; I replaced the cables with 48Gbps ones with no luck. I finally discovered that if I connect the Apple TV 4K to my LG C9 and use eARC the problems seem to go away. It’s only if I connect the Apple TV 4K to my Denon (any input) that I have the problem (though I seem to have to reboot the 4K after switching to the TV input to get the 4K working smoothly again after the audio issues start up).

A Roku streamer has no issues with the same cable when plugged into the same input on my Denon.

The fact that eARC solves the issue seems to prove it’s a software not a hardware issue.