I thought that it was a DRM reason why you couldn’t playback commercial Dolby Atmos on anything apart from through a closed system over HDMI.
On PC you cannot listen to music in Atmos with Tidal, Apple Music or Amazon etc. even over hdmi.
Only games and movies support Atmos on PC.
The hdmi output on this 16” M1 Max MacBook Pro won’t allow me to playback Atmos with the marantz either.
I read that only the Apple TV could playback Apple Music in Atmos on a speaker setup such as 7.1.4.
It does work flawlessly for me (as in the video) Tidal also works flawlessly with the Apple TV hardware over hdmi.
The latest MacBook hdmi output is hdmi is only 2.0 but the Apple TV box is hdmi 2.1 and works perfectly (as you can see in my video)
My setup is the most affordable setup I could find.
My PC, Apple TV, Xbox etc are connected to the marantz hdmi inputs. Pc for Atmos movies and Atmos games, Apple TV for Atmos music.
The marantz balanced xlr outputs connect to the balanced ferrofish TRS inputs. Then ferrofish TRS outputs connect to my 7.0.4 Adam active monitors.
The ferrofish pulse 16 is also connected to my RME digiface USB over ADAT.
This allows me to connect my MacBook via a single USB cable to the digiface usb and use the RME total mix matrix to route the audio anywhere I want and make Atmos mixes in Logic.
It works flawlessly.
I even have different snapshots in total mix for soloing overhead speakers or just the surrounds etc. (you can also see this in the video)
I then have the hdmi output of the marantz going to the projector.
That way I can watch movies in Atmos, listen to music in Atmos, play games in Atmos and make music in Logic in Atmos on the same speakers using just the marantz the ferrofish and the RME digiface usb hardware (as well as the speakers)