Hi all,
To start, this is not a complaint or a request for “troubleshooting.” On the contrary, I’m pleasantly surprised at the audio quality I’m getting giving my system limitations, but am a bit mystified as to how it’s arriving there.
A bit of background on my setup and components:
- ATV 4k
- TCL P605 TV (supports 4k, HDR10, DV, Dolby Digital +, but NOT DTS HDMA or True HD)
- Older Sony AV receiver that supports lossless audio, but not 4k or HDR
- NAS with many movies containing lossless audio tracks
Due to my AVR’s limitations, I’m running my ATV directly to my TV, and outputting the sound to the AVR via ARC. Now, ARC unfortunately doesn’t support lossless audio formats, DD+ is the highest to my understanding. Additionally, to my understanding the TCL P605 does NOT support multichannel LPCM, and will down mix such signals to stereo.
Here is where things get interesting. If I play a move in Infuse from my NAS with say, a Dolby True HD track, I would anticipate the ATV/Infuse would output that as multichannel LPCM, the TCL would down mix to stereo, and that is what my AVR would receive. However, that is not what happens! Instead, the AVR is actually displaying a DD+ signal! I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this result, and am able to consistently produce it.
Now, some info on my settings:
- I have the ATV always set to Best Quality Available
- It doesn’t seem to matter whether I have Infuse set to auto or passthrough, my AVR sees the DD+ signal either way. However, the auto setting creates a sync issue between the audio and video (which is another question I have - would love an audio delay feature), so I have been using passthrough. I know auto is supposed to produce a superior result, but I still see the DD+ signal with passthrough so… I dunno.
So what’s going on here?? Is the ATV seeing that my TV doesn’t support multichannel LPCM, and remixing it to DD+ from True HD? Is my TV or Infuse working some magic here behind the scenes? I’m so confused (but happy)!