Applications not remembering preferred sound device

Hey guys,
On my last PC, (AMD FX-8350 on an ASROCK 990FXA Killer- Realtek 1150 chipset, Windows 8.1), I could open up Firefox, have it set to speakers, and put on some music. Then I could change the default sound device to headphones and boot up a game. This left the music playing over the speakers and let me have positional audio in game through the headphones. I had the speakers hooked up to the rear inputs and the headphone hooked in through the panel.

Alternately, I could put on music in one Firefox window with it set to headphones and get some schoolwork done, then change it to speakers, open a new window, and throw on Netflix on the projector for my wife to watch on the speakers.

Now I have new PC and that no longer works. (i7 4770 on MSI Z97m Gaming- Realtek 1150 chipset, Windows 8.1)
When I change the default sound device, all audio switches over to that device, even if it was previously playing through another one. Applications no longer remember what they were playing through. Is there a way to fix this behavior?

Note that I am talking applications that do NOT have a setting to pick which device they play through. For example, Skype does have this setting, and will only output through the device specified. That's dandy, but Firefox does not have that capability and most games don't either.

I have searched online for solutions to this problem to no avail. I do have the latest BIOS for my board. All drivers are the latest available and I don't see any option for changing the front audio jack to AC97. It's either enabled or disabled and that's it.

I would appreciate any help that you guys may offer me.


EDIT:
After some searching I think I found the issue. It has nothing to do with my new PC. It's that Firefox was "bugged" to have this behavior of not changing audio devices until the window was closed and opened. This was fixed in Firefox 36 beta 3.
I posted a question for the Firefox devs here.

But yeah, if any of you have a work-around that doesn't cost money (Chevolume) please let me know!
It seems like in previous versions of Windows, it was the default behavior to keep sound on a device until the application was restarted. That gives me hope that there is some way to get this behavior back.