Apple TV 4K - Horrible Audio Quality

Plex Players Streaming Devices
1

Server Version#: 1.32.6.7557
Player Version#: 8.26 (7089)

Hi,

When playing from my Apple TV 4K, Plex will not direct stream and will not transcode to anything other than AAC, and it sounds absolutely atrocious. It’s like watching a cinema quality picture while listening to the soundtrack via a 144p YouTube upload from 15 years ago. Everything has that distinct metallic sound of crushed, low bitrate, low quality digital audio, this is not a slight degradation, it’s unbearably bad.

The native Plex app on the same TV (Sony A9 OLED) transcodes to AC3 and sounds perfect.

No matter what settings are changed (ATV audio, HDMI, TV audio, passthrough, Plex server and client app settings), I’ve tried every possible combination of settings and yet it refuses to stream anything other than crappy bit crushed AAC to the ATV.

It was my understanding that ATVs should support AC3, or is this just the way it is now?

Thanks,
Harry

2

Can you be more specific regarding the source audio formats involved? And provide the XML information for an example file?

In my own simple environment, when my server needs to transcode audio to my Apple TV 4K Plex client, it does so to FLAC, not AAC.

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