@traubr I’d like to point out two things that others have mentioned and my feedback.
First off, you’re using a modded appletv to stream. The file you’re hearing is compressed heavily in the audio department and you lose a lot of the info. It doesn’t matter what’s been done to the AppleTV and all it’s doing is polishing a turd. I have demoed that very claim hundreds of times to clients by playing a movie clip on an AppleTV then that same clip using a bluray disk and a cheap bluray player.
Second - I would strongly suggest utilizing the Dirac feature. You mentioned the price of the mic, the MiniDSP UMIK1 is around $80. Considering you bought a highly modded AppleTV, $80 is pretty cheap. With that said, Dirac has a ton of really great tools and if you’re not comfortable in diving into them all I would suggest hiring someone that can help you. There are a ton of options of dirac wiz kids that can even work on your system remotely which works out too.
If you are wanting to get the very best audio and video out of your system and still stream, there’s only one option and that’s from a company called Kaleidescape. Their files are a true 1 to 1 bit rate to the original. Below is a link to their player, scroll about half way down and you’ll see a graph comparing an appletv to their file. I’d suggest finding a dealer close and look into it further if you’re interested.
https://www.kaleidescape.com/strato-movie-players/