Apple TV3 Sennheiser RS 175 Optical Audio Out

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Apple TV3 Sennheiser RS 175 Optical Audio Out

Hello!

I have a Bose Lifestyle 235 Series 2.1 home theater system with a Samsung TV. Cable box, Apple TV, and HTPC all go via HDMI to the Bose receiver for audio and video. Only video gets sent to the TV, obviously. I just purchased a Sennheiser RS 175 wireless headphone system and since the Bose has no optical audio out, I connected the Apple TV to the Sennheiser base station via Optical cable.

In the Apple TV menu, sound is sent to both the headphones and the Bose speakers...perfect! But as soon as I start a movie, the headphone base station goes into a standby mode and I only get sound through the speakers. To make things even weirder, I tried watching an episode of season 3 of The Walking Dead that I have in my iCloud library and the headphones were working fine.

I am starting to suspect that if the movie or show is presented in Dolby Digital, the Apple TV only sends audio out to HDMI.

Does anybody have any suggestion? I was browsing the forums last night and tried playing with the Audio settings according to other recommendations, but no luck.

Thanks in advance!

Posted on Nov 8, 2015 11:01 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 21, 2015 8:17 PM in response to MrElussive

i was looking at getting some of these RS 175s, specifically so I wouldn't need to get a seperate DAC to convert the optical out of the apple tv for headphones. Looking at the new Apple tvs with everything going out over hdmi, it's a bit of a moot point now. When I was researching them, I pulled down the manual and noticed that they don't seem to decode Dolby Digital. You could try disabling Dolby and only have the Apple TV send PCM to the headphones, which they should understand.

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