If you are using a Mac to play movies and music in Dolby Atmos, you will soon be able to pass through the bitstream over HDMI. Next up, Apple TV?
Home entertainment enthusiasts have for years been calling on Apple to add support for audio passthrough to let a receiver decode the audio bitstream instead of the Apple device.
According to MacRumors, this feature will come to Mac computers this fall with the release of macOS Sequoia.
HDMI passthrough in macOS Sequoia. Photo: MacRumors
- "The new functionality appears in various places in macOS 15, including Apple's TV, Music, and QuickTime Player apps. Apple says turning on the option lets users 'Play supported audio in Dolby Atmos and other Dolby Audio formats using HDMI Passthrough when connected to a supported device'," reported MacRumors.
Next up, Apple TV?
There are currently no signs of audio passthrough in the tvOS 18 beta 2 for Apple TV 4K, but the fact that it is coming to macOS soon raises the odds.
Apple TV 4K already supports Dolby Atmos, so why do people want passthrough support? One reason is that Apple TV 4K decodes Atmos (and all other audio) on-device and outputs it over HDMI as Dolby MAT 2.0, which is LPCM plus metadata for Atmos, i.e., a high-bandwidth signal supported only by some devices and only via a TV if the TV supports HDMI eARC, unless a TV with conventional HDMI ARC can transcode on-the-fly.
Another reason is that users want to play their Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray rips with lossless sound such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. This does not require audio passthrough (and Apple TV 4K already supports TrueHD and DTS-HD MA if you buy the license in an app such as Infuse), but the hope is that audio passthrough will make it more universally supported in apps and that it will unlock support for Dolby Atmos in TrueHD and DTS:X, which are the two audio formats not supported by Apple TV 4K in any form.
macOS Sequoia will be released this fall as a free upgrade alongside tvOS 18, iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and visionOS 2.
- Source: MacRumors
