I managed to test things with the VLC Player and seems that you can not change the audio decoder as needed.
While VLC is playing a channel (with no audio), open the Tools tab and then down to the Preferences and then down to the Show Settings ALL option and the next menu will show a list with the Audio category, but skip that and look further down in the Input/codecs category is the Audio Codecs option. Double click that to bring a drop down menu.
But I do not see how the decoder can be changed as R2D2 outlines. Seems VLC can't do that change.
The drop down menu does have other audio preferences but none seem to help. Click on one of them preferences and a menu will appear on the right side. Hover over the title and a description context box will appear. Here you can read on what the option does.
There are other sub categories you could explore in the audio codec tab, like Demuxers, Filters... maybe something in there can be useful.
I'd say to try m3u playlist with tivimate, as R2D2 has shown it does work thru there.
Just a FYI to add, .. VLC does allow using the m3u playlist URL as well as the hardcopy.
Open the Media tab.
Media > Network Steaming > add the URL