Continuous Audio Connection Issues

[u/Repulsive_Set_4155]

I've finally gotten around to troubleshooting some audio issues I've had in my home theater setup since earlier in this year. The main one was an intermittent low end thump on the back channels of my L95TR system. Turns out CAC in AppleTV was the culprit or, well, Dolby MAT to be more specific (was having the same problem on the PS5 until I discovered the Dolby Atmos audio priority function in settings does what CAC does, ie, wraps audio in a Dolby MAT container).

Seems like it was kinda screwing up the sound in general. Everything was much louder with CAC on, but compressed/muddy. After turning it off everything sounds so much better. My wife noticed it too, and she's much less picky than me (the back channel noise didn't even bother her, but she did notice an improvement to sound without being prompted to weigh in).

I think in general if you notice sound problems like this on any streaming device you have, try to figure out if it has its own feature that uses Dolby MAT wrapper, then turn that off. This will cause audio drops when your next piece of media has a audio format different from the last (stereo to Atmos, let's say) but I have been able to get the delay to basically zero by going through my TV and disabling features that post process audio (pretty much anything with AI in the name, or things that claim to help sync HDMI audio and video are actually adding latency and you only want them on if you notice a problem that requires automated intervention at the panel level).

I'm wandering around fora Johnny Appleseeding this information because it's been driving me crazy on the AppleTV since March, and longer on my Playstation. Hope it saves people some headaches.