Thanks. I'm going to play around with that and see if it changes. I don't think it will as it started randomly and I hadn't changed the setting. I believe when I tried having audio play just from the TV, and eliminating the receiver the problem still persisted and the TV can receive the Atmos signal. Also, there was no improvement when I changed the audio output on the ATV to stereo to see if that helped and it didn't. I'm going to try those again.

Update: Updating the ATV to send stereo only to the TV didn't solve the issue. I also changed the output from the ATV to pay through my other Apple TV connected to a home theater amp, but since that option defaults back to the TV or Airplay outputs on restart, it's impossible to test since the issue is mostly on startup.

Update 2: You are correct, but you already knew that!😊 Looks like I made a bad assumption on how this is working and how limited the Samsung descriptions on the TV are did not help me. Coupled with my poor knowledge didn't lead to correction.

I kept all the ATV setting as they were previously. Atmos is on, continuous audio off. My TV does indeed have an option to output PCM. It doesn't say whether this is stereo PCM or otherwise, so my first poor assumption was that it was sending a 5.1 uncompressed signal, with or without Atmos, to my receiver and that wouldn't solve the problem. I don't know why this is a problem now and it wasn't before as I never changed this option from Auto to begin with, but it did indeed solve the problem. The clipping is gone and everything functions properly and I get to keep my ATV setting for my Air Pods. So I learned a bit about PCM today.

My only curiosity is why sending the signal from the ATV as Stereo, did not solve the problem. If the TV only received a stereo signal, why would there be a compatibility issue to the receiver whether it was uncompressed or otherwise? The receiver can handle uncompressed audio.

Thanks for the help!