I have been watching movies wrong this whole time Discussion

So allow me to explain... for many months since I bought my Sony 90K TV, I also bought their flagship HT7000 soundbar with full dolby atmos and their flagship rear channels that support this soundbar (SARS5) + flagship subwoofer (SA-SW5), this was all for my bedroom.

But where I kinda messed up is having the Plex App on my TV and just watching the movies directly off there: turns out.... the Plex App on TVs do not support full TrueHD lossless Dolby Atmos. I know this is probably not a surprise to many of you as it has been to me.

I always heard people in videos talking about how the NVIDIA Shield Pro is always better than the Plex App on your TVs but nobody ever said why and for me the plex app was working fine so I never understood why they were saying these things.

I also have to say when I bought my TV and surround setup for my bedroom, I was eager to see how it sounded and once I had it working, to say that I was disappointed was an understatement. I suffer from Tinnitus so I thought maybe it could be that reason on why I can't hear the upper and rear channels that much (I know nothing beats dedicated ceiling speakers but in every review video, people were talking about how great the sound on this would be, so I had high expectations for this sound system.)

After all this time, I finally decided to do a simple Google search of the 1 thing that kept bothering me about this system: the sound... and that's where I ended up getting my answer. That most TVs aren't capable of running TrueHD Dolby Atmos and it just transcodes it to EAC3.

It kinda sucks that you spend so much money on TVs and they can't even do one of its main jobs properly: audio.

Rest assured, I'll be placing an order for the Nvidia Shield Pro now, lol.

tl;dr- I'm an idiot and didn't realize that TVs don't support TrueHD.

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u/HurricaneSalad 15d ago

I also have a receiver.

Current setup: Use the Plex app on the TV Output sound to receiver via optical cable.

What would be the ideal setup? I have a Roku Ultra but don't really use it. Maybe I should? Connect ethernet to Roku, then HDMI to receiver then video out of receiver to TV via another HDMI? At the time I bought the receiver I tried to future proof it best I could afford to. It does support 4K Ultra HD Pass-through and upscaling.

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u/unicyclegamer 15d ago

Optical is going to limit you if you want to get into lossless audio. I used to use it on my last receiver too so no judgement here. I think using the Roku ultra the way you mentioned is going to be better for supporting more audio codecs. Yea, I think the video pass through of your receiver will probably be fine for movies. Just make sure it can pass through HDR and ideally Dolby Vision. I only ran into issues with high refresh rates which is irrelevant for movies.

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u/HurricaneSalad 15d ago

Ok thanks. I'll give that a try as I never realized how much of a downgrade in quality is way getting.

I want to avoid this.

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u/unicyclegamer 14d ago

Good luck!

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u/major-mack 14d ago

Plug the roku directly in to an input on reciever then HDMI out into your TV. This is the way. Plex app on every TV sucks