What type of device is your Apple TV connected to?
What is the Audio Format option set to?
I just tested your sample here with a traditional 5.1 AVR setup (tried with the Audio Format set to Auto and Dolby 5.1), and the dialogue in your sample was correctly coming out of the center channel.
Apple TV 4K (2020, I believe) > Sony a90j > Onkyo rz50 (earc)
Sony eARC is set to auto
Apple audio format is set to auto, atmos available
Onkyo is set to direct, however sound is coming from the right surround in all modes but stereo.
Tested with the following apps:
Infuse - sound comes out of wrong speakers
MrMC (paid) - sound output is correct
VLC - sound output is correct
If I play the compatability track (Dolby Digital 5.1, didn’t include in the sample to save space) the sound outputs correctly in Infuse.
Some more testing. This only happens with eARC. Connected directly into the avr the sound works fine.
This suggests something wrong with how the tv (Sony A90J) outputs 7.1 LPCM, however I’m still not convinced as MrMC, VLC, and Plex haven’t got any issue.
This guy had the same issue, and he posted about it 3 months ago. A couple of commenters seemed to share it, and in my own post, one of the commenters also experiences it.
The common factors seem to be Infuse and eARC. Our TVs were different (mine is a Sony A90J, another was an LG C2, and the third a Sony X90J), our AVRs were different (Onkyo RZ50, Denon, Onkyo NR7100), but all had issues with 7.1 when going through eARC and playing with Infuse.
Is there another app you know of that uses those same audio pipelines that I can test with?
I did some more testing with a DTS-HD demo disk’s speaker assignment video. DTS-HD 5.1 was fine, DTS-HD 7.1 played like this:
Front left came from front left
Center came from surround right
Front right came from surround left
right side was silent
right rear was silent
left side came from the sub
left rear came from the sub
LFE came from the sub
So the issue is when three conditions are met: eARC, Infuse, 7.1. Take one out of the equation and everything is fine.
Thanks for the info. This is the first time I am seeing a report of issues here, but we can look into this to see if there’s anything we can do from the Infuse side to improve this.
To legitimately answer your question, there could be a few reasons. For example, Sony tvs cannot do VRR AND Dolby Vision. It’s either one or the other. So, let’s say someone has a gaming console and an Apple Tv, they cannot connect both to the AVR without sacrificing one or the other.
Or perhaps they do not have an AVR compatible with DV, they need to go via earc.
Maybe they use a Bluenode or something with earc, but no hdmi in.
There are many reasons, and even if there were none, should a bug go ignored because it doesn’t affect one configuration?
It is clearly a bug with tvos17, though. Since first posting about it, Plex now has the same issue. MrMc doesn’t only because it hasn’t been updated in such a long time.
Would be great if Infuse could implement a workaround, but the only way I’ve found to fix it is to go into the Apple TV’s settings>Video and Audio and under Audio change the Audio Format from “Change format off” to Dolby Digital 5.1.
Hopefully you won’t notice a drop in audio quality.
Hey all.
For the past year I have needed to utilise a two box solution to get around this. One box (Apple TV) for all streaming media, and another (Zidoo z9x) for all rips (remuxes and anything with DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD).
Unfortunately my fix in the previous post traded one bug for another. Sync issues abounded with the Audio format changed to DD5.1. Going into the settings every time I watched something different suddenly took away from the point in going Apple in the first place (the whole “it just works” mantra.)
Is there any news on whether tvOS18 has fixed this?
Just reporting my observations here, I also ran that 7.1 DTS-HD MA speaker test and everything played fine on my system (ATV 4K latest gen plugged into LG C1 which is connected over e-ARC to Samsung Q930B with separate rear speakers).
