Is there a difference between having the Apple TV output stereo (e.g. converting 5.1. dolby into 2.0 PCM), and doing the same conversion in an AVR?
Please assume that the same DAC / amplification is applied to the resulting 2.0 stream. I am only interested in the decoding / mixing down of dolby surround, as well as potential differences in resulting bitrates (down/upsampling in either approach).
Has someone with AVR tested this?
The reason for the question is that I am currently doing the translation to stereo in the ATV, then splitting the audio from the HDMI to a DAC, and feeding that to an AMP. I wonder whether to upgrade my DAC or to get an AVR, and therefore whether an AVR is beneficial to the processing of surround streams when compared to in-software conversion.