Is there a way to enable the headphone output for audio while using HDMI for video? I have a yarvik tab464euk tablet, which I'm mostly happy with in an it-was-cheap kind of way. However, there is a particular annoyance.

I have a monitor which has a rarely-used HDMI port (my PC connects via DVI). I don't have a HDMI TV, or any kind of TV at all. Sometimes, I'd like to use my tablet as a media player using the HDMI monitor.

I can connect the tablet to the monitor without any problem, but of course it's a monitor - like many monitors, it doesn't have speakers. That's fine - the tablet also has a headphone jack socket. I thought I'd do exactly what I do for my PC - connect the tablet to the speakers separately.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work. The headphone socket works fine, but not when the mini-HDMI cable is connected. As soon as I have a HDMI monitor connected, the headphone output is switched off - I checked with two sets of headphones as well as speakers to make sure this wasn't a dodgy cable issue.

Giving priority to HDMI seems very odd to me. First, monitors with HDMI but no speakers are quite common. Second, even if I was using a TV with speakers, the obvious reason for having headphones plugged in is because I want to use those for the sound, not the TV speakers.

So... Is this a general thing with Android tablets? Is there a setting I can change to control it? Or is there any other way to get the headphone audio output to work while a HDMI monitor is connected?

I've seen this question about splitters, but the price is out of proportion plus the convenience isn't there. Part of the point is to reduce hardware clutter, tangled cables etc. I already have a media player that works with separate HDMI and audio just fine, but it never gets used because it gets put away to avoid the clutter and tangle, then it's just not worth the hassle to set it up again later.

And it just seems so stupid anyway that the headphone socket is there and works, but it switches off when I most want to use it.
This is a non-answer to close the question. In the unlikely case that an actual answer appears, I'll transfer the accept to that.

No solution was found for the question as asked. By now, I doubt that anyone will ever care for that particular model of tablet, which was cheap even back when it was new. I'm still using it, as it happens, but mostly only as a PDF reader.

For displaying video, some monitors have an audio output to external speakers driven by the audio from the HDMI. It turns out my monitor had that - I'd just somehow managed to miss that at the time. I also now have a TV/monitor with built-in speakers. I still don't care about broadcast TV - I want the composite video inputs for an old PS/2.