We’ve confirmed at WWDC that tvOS 26 is getting passthrough audio, which could allow a higher quality listening experience by disabling audio preprocessing on the Apple TV hardware, before hand-off to a sound system.
Apple TV 4K
Apple TV 4K
The Apple TV family is a very capable processing device for a set-top box, but one bone of contention has been audio processing. Apple has so far avoided adding passthrough audio features to the Apple TV, but that is seemingly changing.
A reference on the Apple Developer documentation for AVFAudio has an enumeration case for AVAudioContentSource for “passthrough.”