Hey
I’ve got a Beam Gen 2 + Surrounds + Sub, and I’m experiencing some audio quality issues when I play content marked as Dolby Digital 5.1 on my Apple TV. Basically, this content sounds oddly quiet, and even after I turn up the volume, surround effects are EXTREMELY subtle.
After doing some digging on this forum and others, I believe the issue is this: my TV (an LG CX) handshakes with the Beam and, because the Beam can receive a 7.1 PCM signal, that’s what it asks the Apple TV to output. This means that the Apple TV is mapping the 5.1 signal to 7.1, and then the Beam (because it can only actually output 5.1) is remapping that remapped signal to 5.1, resulting in a dulled-out sound by the time that signal actually reaches my speakers.
To be clear, when the Beam receives PCM 5.1 from my PS5 or Dolby Atmos from the ATV, it sounds great. But because the ATV tries to “simplify” things by converting Dolby Digital 5.1 signals to 7.1 PCM, it’s giving a less than ideal signal to the Beam.
SO. While I understand that PCM 7.1 support is probably necessary for compatibility reasons, I wonder if it’d be possible to add an option for limiting PCM signals to 5.1 in the Sonos settings, so you could force the ATV to cap its output to 5.1.