What's the best option for splitting audio between two monitors? - Hardware & Software

I have a monitor and smart TV hooked up to my PC, the monitor uses DVI while the TV uses HDMI, and I was trying to find a good solution to split the audio between the TV speakers and my PC speakers. My TV is receiving audio via the HDMI cable while my PC speakers are receiving audio through my motherboard's standard audio jack. Is there a reliable solution to this with software, or should I look into hardware like a splitter of some kind? I've looked it up and I've gotten pretty mixed answers, and I'm not even really sure what sort of hardware solution would work for this configuration. My wife uses the TV to watch Netflix and we don't currently have access to WiFi as we're waiting for the ISP in our town to finally get broadband (Yeah, we don't have broadband yet thanks to the town being so small and full of old people). I'm just looking for a temporary solution in the meantime that won't be awkward or inconsistent, I know some games have settings for separate audio sources which works great, but they tend to be the minority by far. I know there are several choices in terms of software, I just wanted to know what others think is the best option or if you might have dealt with this type of situation. I do plan on eventually separating the TV from my PC and actually getting another monitor when we get decent internet, so this isn't really an urgent problem but more of a temporary one.

Thanks! The second option is pretty much what I'm looking for, its better than installing and dealing with a program to do it.

I'll back up Lolkork here by saying that after reading your post twice thrice, I'm still confused as to what you're trying to accomplish. Do you want your wife to be able to watch Netflix on the TV while you play some CoD or what?

Yeah, I wanted a way to play video games/listen to music/watch videos while my wife watches Netflix, so Lolkork's answer should work fine. Just need to update Windows since I haven't in a long time and the feature I was looking for got added in April. I understand why the question was a bit confusing, I just want to be able to basically isolate the HDMI audio from everything else but I can see now why it doesn't really work that way necessarily, either way choosing the audio source for separate programs is what I was looking for.

Yeah I'm working on getting the app, for whatever reason watching it in Chrome causes pretty bad lag, I'm not sure if its system interrupts but it affects the whole system and so far Netflix is the only thing that causes it.

Not that I've noticed, the sound only comes out of the TV and I'm generally 15 feet or so away, but it seems clean to me. The video itself lags pretty hardcore every five seconds, and it chokes up my whole system when it does. My smart TV is old enough that JVC hasn't updated it in at least two years, but it doesn't have any lag issues whatsoever so I definitely miss that, I've heard that chrome has issues with Netflix. Even MS edge works better from what I've heard, but I haven't tested it.

I have the same setup on Windows sound settings with app volume and whatnot. Chrome is on TV and everything else is on default. If I want other things coming from TV, I simply change the master from default to TV. In my case though, I mainly use Firefox and Chrome is my alternate browser and I don't care if the sound settings may be messed up, so I mainly use Netflix through Chrome with no issues. It starts lagging when I do something resource intensive (noticeably dropped frames) but then I either set affinity to other cores or stop doing that thing. The built-in sound manager in WIndows 10 is a good reason to upgrade, before you had to go through virtual audio cable/audiosplit/whatever else but now it is seamless and doesn't crash as often. But if you have issues with Netflix and you think Chrome is the issue, certainly try other browsers.

I have Windows 10 I just need to finally update, I disabled updates over a year ago and have just been ignoring the pop-ups for them, but that definitely seems like reason enough to do it. I kind of remember trying some audio solutions years ago and the results were fairly inconsistent so I'm glad to have a solution built in to Windows finally, it sort of seems like a no-brainer honestly. I'll definitely try some other browsers though, I used to be a hardcore Firefox fan but switched to Chrome when it first released, but I've definitely noticed using quite a bit more RAM than I ever remember Firefox doing.