I've been having an issue with audio on my system. When watching certain videos (I've only seen this on YouTube), the sound cuts out intermittently. After a lot of experimentation, I've discovered that it only happens on videos where speech is interrupted with moments of complete silence.  At the beginning I hear, "Please understand that there is a huge difference [ ] TES5Edit merge patch [ ] merging mods. Merge patch is a patch that is created [ ] records..." and so on. It is always the first word after a pause.

I have found that if I run another video in the background that provides constant sound (like playing a music video in VLC), it doesn't cut the words out. It almost seems as if the sound hardware is going into a 'sleep' mode or turning off when there is complete silence, and it takes a split second to reactivate when sound starts again, cutting off the first word.

I've tried every troubleshooting technique related to software that I could find: enabling and disabling hardware acceleration for the browser, disabling Flash, trying three different browsers. 

I discovered that it plays fine if I plug in my USB headphones, bypassing the NVIDIA hardware entirely. 

My current setup looks like this: video card ---> HDMI cable ---> HDMI splitter ---> TV ---> sound system (no, I don't have a receiver, and can't afford one.) It works beautifully for anything that doesn't have complete silence.

I've also tried switching out the HDMI cable, using a DisplayPort cable, bypassing the HDMI splitter, and using a different HDMI plug on the TV. None makes any difference.

It seems really likely at this point that the culprit is the card itself, or a setting for the card, and some sort of low-power/sleep feature seems likely, too. Any help would be appreciated.

Motherboard: Asus P6T
Video card: EVGA GTX 950
CPU: Core i7 920 2.67GHz
RAM: 8 GB
Windows 10 Home 64 Bit
TV: Panasonic TC-L42U25

Sajin
Uninstall the nvidia hd audio driver. Reboot PC. Retest.

I tried that, restarted.  Same result.

It is identifying it correctly through the device manager, so I'm going to guess it did.  I didn't check the version number before I uninstalled it, so I can't be sure if it replaced it with the version I had or the 'default' version built into Win10/Update.

Ok, I blocked that.  Uninstalled again through the device manager.  Rebooted.  Checked the device manager and playback devices, and both showed a generic driver rather than recognizing it as Nvidia.   Problem persists.