Apple TV – Picture not working when soundbar pass-through enabled

Even if a soundbar’s marketing spins that it is an ATMOS soundbar, that’s a whole lot of spin. The magic of ATMOS is leveraging MANY discrete speakers spread around a room, not one up front & center. ATMOS basically encourages more than 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setups by mixing in some more speakers, particularly some overhead. I suspect at least some of the game of ATMOS is to motivate even more individual speaker purchases in home theater. Apparently 5-7 plus at least 1 sub is still not enough (for the speaker manufacturers).

Pretending like a soundbar can deliver ATMOS is an audio illusion at best. Real ATMOS is going to use a pretty good number of speakers all around the room and in the ceiling too. There’s no way for 1 speaker to fully do that job… just faking it.

However, that offered, it appears you need to split video & audio from HDMI. There are devices for this, though I wonder if any of the cheap ones (
Next best option that WILL work is to get yourself an A/V Receiver:

• AppleTV HDMI into Receiver.
• Receiver HDMI video out to TV.
• Receiver HDMI audio out to Soundbar.

Bonus: receiver will have plenty of additional HDMI jacks for PS4, WDTV and other stuff too.

Over time, a receiver can be the hub for building yourself a true home theater setup with at least 5.1 discrete speakers instead of embracing a soundbar to try to do all of the speaker jobs. If any soundbar could actually do that, every movie theater would have one soundbar speaker down front instead of all of those many speakers positioned all around the seats.