What are you doing for audio? That's been my big stumbling block when trying to use a newer AppleTV with an older TV and 5.1-channel amp. I've tried several HDMI audio extractors and found them all to be pretty terrible.
The best solution I’ve found is an HDMI matrix. If all you need is to connect your HDMI devices to the TV and an older receiver, get a 2x2 or 4x2 matrix, have one of the outputs go to the TV and one to the receiver. This solves the problem where the TV supports newer HDMI standards than the receiver.
Now if the receiver is old enough to not have HDMI at all, there aren’t too many options. S/PDIF from the TV to the receiver works, but is lossy above 2 channels. HDMI audio extractors work, but most suck. I had a monoprice one for a few years that was decent, but not great. There aren’t any other options than that though, unless your sources have discrete channel outputs (an RCA jack for each channel), which these days are effectively non-existent.
I have a decent - not great, but decent - Sony STRDH590 receiver that serves as an HDMI switcher. Apple TV and PS5 send HDMI to it, and it selects the signal to forward on to the TV.
An antique Pioneer VSX-45TX receiver with an older-but-not-quite-antique Vizio LCD TV used as a dumb HDMI monitor. Looks good, sounds good, but doesn't work with the newest AppleTV since there's no way to get audio back out of the monitor, as there is with many newer sets.
Right now I'm using the previous-generation AppleTV with a S/P-DIF output to drive the VSX-45TX, but Netflix has announced that they don't want to support that AppleTV model anymore, as of the end of July.
Sounds like the HDMI matrix box as mentioned by jmb99 is a likely win. There are a few models that break out the audio to S/P-DIF. Maybe by spending $99 instead of $19 I'll have better luck than I did with the simple audio extractor boxes I tried a couple of years ago.
Got it. You’re almost in the situation where if you want to upgrade the CPU, you’ll need newer RAM, but that goes in a different motherboard, with connectors your PSU doesn’t have… but at least you can keep the case!
