Apple TV Audio Dropout Fix

If you have an Apple TV and you happen to notice the audio randomly dropping from your AV receiver I have a fix for you. In my home setup I have a AVR-X4500H which works fine but every once in a while the audio would drop while the picture kept going. I chalked this up to some streaming stutter or randomness and it didn’t bother me too much until I watched The Secret Agent on Hulu. It started out ok but eventually about 3/4ths through the film it was dropping audio every 2 minutes. I couldn’t watch it like that. When the audio would drop the receiver display would lose the surrounding speaker layout. Within that second it would re-display them and the audio format. I thought Dolby Atmos was to blame here but after setting it to stereo and the drop out still occurring I got to the culprit, “Enhanced Dialogue.”

I had turned this on a while back for something that was hard to hear. On the Apple TV go to Settings, Video and Audio, Enhanced Dialog to off. My issue immediately went away. I suspect it has something to do with the audio signal being modified and some part of the stream not keeping up maybe. Hopefully this solves the problem for you like it solved it for me.