A cluster of Apple TV owners over the last several months have been complaining about several issues when using external speakers with the Apple TV and attempting to listen to Dolby Atmos audio.
A thread on Apple's support forums, which started in September 2021 and has over 25 pages of users sharing complaints, chronicles how users are experiencing issues with their Apple TV and Dolby Atmos. According to users, when listening to Dolby Atmos content, audio will sometimes either completely cut out and go silent, goes out of sync with the videos on the screen, or is choppy and stutters.
While there are some users who are experiencing the issue across Apple TV apps, a large portion of the complaints come from when users use the Netflix app. Some users have found that changing audio settings and disabling Dolby Atmos entirely solves the issues. Apple released tvOS 15.4.1 last month and that update does not seem to have addressed the bugs. Are you experiencing similar issues? Let us know down in the comments.
Top Rated Comments
Apple has shown a complete lack of care with the Apple TV for years, so this doesn’t surprise me (it took years for them to enable proper 24.000hz playback instead of playing said media at 23.976hz, causing frame stutter).
Yes, in the meantime switching off Atmos “solves” the problem (even for NON-Atmos content!), but that’s a real shame, of course.
Audio can also sound "off", like a speaker is occluded or something. It randomly fades back to normal sometimes too.