Streaming alternatives to pricey kaleidoscope?

@xymox 

Welcome to the forum, I see its your first post. The additional info is VERY helpful, especially about the sound. Have you any experience with playing back atmos content, both on music and movies? 

Did you show info is very helpful.

However, the added power supply to me is an ad on that maybe redundant/unnecessary for most people here.  I have a good power supply arrangement and my focus is the sound quality.

So to the extent the Apple TV box can be improved in this area that would be a huge plus and Worth pursuing.

Of course the final problematic concern is we're dealing with compressed signals and not sure how this can really be over come. 

kota1, Apple uses Dolby MAT to decode the Atmos and produce M.LPCM with Atmost meta data. Most modern surround processors display this correctly as Atmos. Some older units show M.LPCM even tho it is Atmos. Because most of the decoding is done in the ATV and sent over in PCM this allows all the tweaks to the AppleTV X CPU to do the decoding in a very dejittered way. But that is not the main source of improvement. The audio data on the HDMI is radically dejittered VS all other HDMI devices I have measured. So the Atmos that comes from the AppleTV sound remarkable VS other gear simply because the HDMI is extremely dejittered. Suddenly you gain a 3D soundstage, depth, delinatition of instruments, nuance, emotion, subtly. Its like going from a cheap Walmart stereo to a high end DAC. The musical scores of movies are so good they distract from the movie for me. I got lost just a few days ago listening to the orchesrta behind nearly every minute of the TV series Picard. There is a french horn or a flute or something in nearly every scene. The performance of each of these instruments was captivating. It defies my understanding how these wonderfully recorded soundtracks have been lost this whole time covered over by terrible HDMI. Blurred into a flat lifeless loss of all detail.

I have clients using local UPnP music servers. I have one guy who took the AppleTV X and put it into the Oppo input and used his modded Oppo to pick off the SPDIF and fed that to a WADEX. He set the appleTV to 2 channel. He said the sound was stunning. He also flipped to the stock AppleTV and said it was terrible.

Its wonderful for sound. The sound improvements are the biggest part of the improvements.

AppleTV does top out at 48/24 uncompressed. It can do 32 channels of that. While its not DSD or 192/24, 48/24 is still really good for most things.

That’s great, I am a fan of atmos music and the weakest link is you have to use HDMI out to my processor instead of my DAC. It sounds good but I realized there is only so much you can squeeze from HDMI no matter how much you spend on a HDMI cable. I was trying to find a workaround by upgrading ethernet cables too which helped a little, but fell short of what the SQ is vs USB in on my DAC. I am looking forward to getting an ATVX unit soon.

@donavabdear , I know you are doing an upgrade, you might want to check this out as an upgrade to the source inpacts everything downstream.

I have an older Apple TV that I no longer use which has an optical port.  What are the implications of using an optical connection to alleviate issues arising from HDMI?   
 

With my existing Apple TV, I upgraded the power cord, the HDMI Cable, and the ethernet Cable as well as feeding all the power from a Transparent Power isolator. Even upgraded my power cord to the back of my processor. This has achieved great results as Long as the production quality of sound within the streamed source is done well.  Problem is the sound quality of many Streamed sources it's not that good and you can really hear the differences.