You are correct, there is a toggle. Unfortunately on my TV it involves going into the setup menu and pushing a bunch of buttons everytime I want to change between listening through the TV speakers and the AVR and it's speakers.

This is a pain and a hassle. I want the TV speakers to work all the time. When I turn the AV system on, I want to be able to hear TV sound through the AV system as well (and just mute the volume on the TV speakers).

This is only an issue because this is the only TV in my house. I leave the TV on CNN during the day as background noise. But when I want to actually watch the TV, I want the sound to come out through my AVR speaker system.

As others have suggested, it looks like the easiest solution would be to get a VCR and run audio through that. Instead I bought a universal remote and programmed macros to go through the TV menu system. This way telling the TV to play sound through the AVR vs. it's own system is now a 1-touch operation.