Apple this week showcased the upcoming tvOS 26 platform, with most of the emphasis being on its fresh new look, which is said to be more responsive and visually appealing, but it seems there’s another treat in store for audiophiles that wasn’t mentioned earlier.
According to reports from Apple Insider and FlatpanelsHD, the tvOS 26 update will also add support for “audio passthrough” in beta, which could mean higher quality surround sound for content streamed over the internet.
FlatpanelsHD says it did some digging and unearthed multiple references to a new AVAudioContentSource.passthrough API in the documentation for tvOS 26. Then, Apple Insider reported separately that Apple has “confirmed” that the new feature will be available once tvOS 26 is released.
"We've confirmed with Apple that by enabling the new passthrough audio when it's available and supported by a streaming app, a high-quality audio stream could be left alone by the Apple TV,” the report states. “This allows for hardware after the Apple TV to process the audio, which could give a higher quality result to the listener.”
It’s an exciting update because, although the Apple TV 4K is one of the best devices for processing streamed content, typically delivering very high quality pictures, its audio processing capabilities have always left a lot to be desired.
The problem is that the Apple TV 4K decodes and processes the audio signals from services like Netflix on the device. What this means is that a Dolby Atmos signal will be decoded to LPCM + metadata, or Dolby MAT 2.0, and sent to the user’s TV, AV receiver or soundbar in its uncompressed format.
Because the signal is uncompressed, the device it’s sent to can’t process itself, which means that even if it’s supposed to be high-quality Dolby Atmos, it won’t be as good as what it would be if the device were able to process the original signal by itself. Instead, it can only spit out sound as processed by Apple, and that sound is often inferior. So even if you have the best home cinema setup the world has ever heard, it won’t reproduce the sounds it’s capable of.
But if the Apple TV 4K supports audio passthrough, this will no longer happen. Instead, it will simply leave the original audio bistream completely untouched and “pass it through” to the user’s external sound device, which will then be able to decode it more effectively. The end result will almost certainly be superior sound quality, FlatpanelsHD says.
There is a small caveat in that developers will probably need to add support for the feature within their streaming apps. So even if Apple does add audio passthrough, as expected, users will need to wait for them to take the time to push out an update that allows their device to take advantage of the native audio signal. With any luck, they’ll do that.
