I tested all of Roku’s audio output settings, and “Auto” wasn’t the best choice.

My Roku Streaming Stick 4K has been in Auto mode since the day I connected it to the LG OLED. I never doubted this because Auto sounds like a setting that a company chooses when its engineers have already solved the problem for you. Plus, with all of Roku’s free content, why would I question the default choice?

And then it happened.

During the movie, half the conversation disappeared during a fight scene and I had to rewind twice to catch what I missed. A few nights after that, the loud soundtrack from another movie turned into what sounded like static—so loud that my significant other asked what that noise was coming from the kitchen. I’ve never actually looked at what audio options (and many others) the Streaming Stick 4K has. It turns out there are more of them than I expected. I picked three clips that I already knew, like a dialogue scene, one that was cut, and one with heavy bass, and watched each one to see what changed.

How does Roku’s automatic audio tuning actually work?

Default value that never checks itself twice

Auto is not really a sound setting. This is an assumption. The Streaming Stick 4K checks what your TV can handle via HDMI and chooses what it thinks is best suited. However, “best” here means whatever the TV claims to support, not necessarily what actually sounds right. In my case, the sound was much softer than I expected.

I first noticed this during a fight scene with the Auto mode set to Stereo, but it didn’t work for me. Nothing was broken, but Auto made a decision one day early on and never went back to see if it still held up.

Stereo

Stereo splits everything into two channels, no matter what the source contains. Dialogue was clear in every clip I watched, more clear than in Auto mode, and it was consistently the driest option. I’m currently re-watching a show with a lot of overlapping dialogue, and for this particular show I went back to stereo – no mixing decisions made behind the scenes, just a clean two-channel signal. The bass stage became flat and thin, as if the low frequencies were asking to leave the room.

Dolby Digital

This is compressed 5.1 format in its familiar form, the one that’s been coming on discs and cable boxes for two decades. Wide dynamic range, clean compression, no sequence cutting or sudden volume spikes that I had to reach for the remote for. Dialogue was a half-step behind stereo in clarity, but ahead of what I got with the default Auto setting.

Photo: Brian M. Wolfe/MakeUseOf

Dolby Digital Plus/Atmos

The bitrate is higher than regular Dolby Digital, and on paper Dolby Atmos should sound better across the board. In practice, on my TV, the dialogue scene sounded almost identical to standard Dolby Digital – I couldn’t tell the difference between them blindly, so I tried twice. Instead, the difference showed up somewhere else.

If this option is selected, Atmos content will actually have a chance to become Atmos. The action sequence had more separation than anything else I tested, with effects tracking more clearly rather than just left to right. The dialogue also remained strong. This is the Auto setting that should have been selected but was not.

PCM stereo

The uncompressed option is what I expected to sound the flattest considering how simple it looks in the menu. This is wrong. Dialogue sounded clear, perhaps the clearest of anything I tested, although the bass test lost some depth compared to the Atmos test. If your TV itself doesn’t handle surround formats well, it’s worth trying stereo before you decide you’re stuck with compressed audio.

Which Roku audio setting should I use instead?

What did I switch to and why did it stick?

Photo: Brian M. Wolfe/MakeUseOf

Not Auto, at least not without checking what it landed on.

Go to Settings > Audio on the Streaming Stick 4K and set the mode manually, without assuming that the automatic mode will take full advantage of your TV’s capabilities. Play something you’re familiar with that has a scene with a lot of dynamic range, not just dialogue, and listen to see if anything actually changes. If it doesn’t, back off and try Dolby Digital Plus for yourself before blaming the content.

If you’re still unsure what your TV is capable of, it’s worth reading our explanation of Dolby Atmos before you start remapping your settings. Half of what determines the “correct” answer isn’t the Roku menu at all; this is what your TV speakers can actually produce.

Five minutes, no more breaks in the kitchen

I looked through the rest of my library after the first weekend of testing, mostly out of curiosity about how bad Auto’s guesses were. It turns out that this wasn’t so much wrong as it was consistently cautious, since it tends to land on the format that is least likely to result in silence, rather than the format that will sound best in your particular setup. This is a reasonable figure for a company that supplies millions of different TVs and audio systems. This is a bad default option for those who have already invested in a decent TV and just want it to sound the same.

My daughter, who came home from college, hasn’t asked what the noise is since I switched. What’s really important here is the entire test, not the specification or what Roku’s marketing says Dolby Digital Plus should theoretically do, only whether the next loud scene sounds like audio rather than static.

If you’ve never opened this menu, it’s worth it. You may have already set the correct settings in Auto mode. Mine didn’t do this.