I’m currently looking te renew my old TV and Surround system. I am running Plex on a Mac Mini, and PMS on a Synology NAS.
I was thinking of buying an Apple TV to replace my Mac Mini. But, apparently an Apple TV doesn’t pass through DTS sound, it is converted to PCM sound. Wowww, really.
In that case, I don’t need an Apple TV. I would prefer to have the maximum sound and image quality on my new system. I really would love to have the best experience. This brings me the question, does the same happen with a Mac Mini when connected to an AV receiver with HDMI cable.
If it really is the case, what is the best way to have DTS sound on a AV receiver using plex.
You know that this PCM stream is the decoded DTS audio stream – no degraded downmix? That is unless you’ve configured your Apple TV to transcode all audio to some Dolby Surround format.
Because I’m never clear how multichannel PCM is going to flow through my rig, I opt for DTS or AC3 pretty often, seeing as the video comes with it.
Yes licensing apparently. It’s common instead to go Mini → AVR → TV on older TVs without eARC.
That should work great, and Plex will send whatever encodes the AVR supports. Make sure the AVR is turned on before the Mini. If you want to give us some model numbers we can be more accurate.
Probably HDMI. Being old I’m happy to use Digital Optical or Digital Coaxial if necessary. There are some good Digital to Digital Adapters that pass through DTS & AC3 in that case, but they’re hard to find.
Damn I’m so out of touch.
I would have sworn that Plex transcoded audio to multi-channel FLAC on the Apple TV last I knew.
Unless that was specifically HD audio such as True-HD and DTS-X?
This supports all current audio formats such as TrueHD + Atmos and DTS:X (if supported by the client & sound equipment).
It also keeps the TV out of the audio path. This is preferable as some TVs block passthrough of some audio formats. I know that is vague, but it varies by TV manufacturer. A specific example is LG, which now blocks passthrough of any DTS audio format.
When researching TVs, check the reviews at rtings.com. They test audio passthrough as part of their review process.
