I currently have my NVIDIA Shield TV connected to my Sony X8500C TV using HDMI and have found that when I pause a video in the Plex app that has a surround track, an often loud pop or static sound is heard emanating from the speakers. When I reroute the audio from the TV to my receiver via optical and passthrough enabled, the receiver shows me that a stereo LPCM track is being received when the passthrough audio is paused and the switching from the bitstreamed track to the stereo track and back again on resume is where the noise occurs.
I’ve tested this scenario with Kodi on the Shield and it does not exhibit the same behaviour. When pausing the video in Kodi, the receiver shows that no audio signal is being received until the video is resumed.
Once the phantom LPCM stereo track has been triggered via plex by pausing a bitstreamed clip, from that point on until the shield is powered off and back on, the track will always show as present on the receiver when nothing is playing.
I’ve tried all combinations of Shield sound settings, and plex settings that I can think of but cannot resolve the issue.
I have also played the audio through the TV speakers without rerouting to the receiver and the pop/static noises can still be heard.
Note: The reason I opted to route the audio via the TV to the receiver rather than going direct via the receiver is due to the age of the receiver and my inability to get the refresh rate change option working, which does work when HDMI is connected direct to the TV.