How do I stop my monitor from being a sound source

My monitor does not have speakers. It shows up as if it does but they do not. I said that in my original post. I see my laptop speakers but then I also see my monitor AS speakers even though it’s a monitor without speakers. And the OS randomly picks those fake speakers as my output. But I guess I found my answer. It seems that mac OS’s do not have an option to disable a specific speaker. It’s very unfortunate. I prefer macs but many times I am jealous of the options on PC’s.

Yes. The issue has been going on for a while before the dock. I havent recently because I have multiple monitors but when I had only one monitor I was just using a HDMI to usb c dongle and it was happening then too. Only happens with my HDMI monitor. The other monitor uses a displayport cable (dell monitor) and that doesn't send audio to the laptop.

Not sure if thats meant to be a suggestion but yes I also can see the speakers for my laptop as well as the monitor. I set it to the laptop or headphones when I use them. But there are enough times where it picks the monitor over the laptop. I was hoping to find that there was a way to disable that speaker option fully, like with PC’s. It’s a very useful setting thats been around for a while on PC’s so was just hoping the same setting was available on Macs. But if not possible I’ll accept the annoyance for now.