Saw someone laying out a full remodel, 77 inch C5, Onkyo N6100, Klipsch 800s up front, 500SAIIs doing Atmos and rears, RP-504CII centre, R-121SW underneath, and then agonising over which streaming box to put in front of it. If you have already spent that, the box is the cheapest decision on the whole list and it is the one getting the most thought. Nothing there is going to be your bottleneck.
Two things worth pulling apart. Dolby Vision and Atmos are questions of passthrough and handshake, not of how good a box sounds or looks on its own merits. So what you are really shopping for is which one argues with your receiver the least. The panel will take DV from anything. The receiver sitting in the middle of the chain is where people actually get bitten, and that is where the boxes genuinely differ.
Not owning any other Apple gear matters far less than people make out. The Apple TV 4K is not gated behind an iPhone, and it has been the least fussy thing I have run through a receiver in years. The Google box does the same job for less money. The Roku will also do what you asked for, but its home screen has been drifting somewhere I do not enjoy, and on a system this size you will be looking at that interface constantly.
The bit nobody mentions: feed the receiver directly rather than going into the TV and back out over eARC. Fewer handshakes to renegotiate every time something wakes up.
What is actually deciding it for you, the interface or the app list?
Two things worth pulling apart. Dolby Vision and Atmos are questions of passthrough and handshake, not of how good a box sounds or looks on its own merits. So what you are really shopping for is which one argues with your receiver the least. The panel will take DV from anything. The receiver sitting in the middle of the chain is where people actually get bitten, and that is where the boxes genuinely differ.
Not owning any other Apple gear matters far less than people make out. The Apple TV 4K is not gated behind an iPhone, and it has been the least fussy thing I have run through a receiver in years. The Google box does the same job for less money. The Roku will also do what you asked for, but its home screen has been drifting somewhere I do not enjoy, and on a system this size you will be looking at that interface constantly.
The bit nobody mentions: feed the receiver directly rather than going into the TV and back out over eARC. Fewer handshakes to renegotiate every time something wakes up.
What is actually deciding it for you, the interface or the app list?
