The PS5 Feature Almost Everyone Missed
There are a handful of things your PS5 can do that you didn't know about. For instance, the DualSense controller came packed with a feature that gamers were unaware of until after the system was released: a button for muting game audio. Even months later, users are making discoveries about their PS5s, and it just so happens they almost missed the full potential of this mute button.
It turns out that if you press the button for a whole second, you won't just mute the game audio, but the entirety of the system's audio. Typically, after successfully halting all game sounds, the controller will confirm your action with an orange light. If the system audio is muted, however, that orange light will glow with a slight pulse.
What does this mean? Not only does it silence your television, but it mutes all headsets connected to your PS5. It's a convenient all-in-one solution to cease any and all sounds that the console itself might produce, along with any associated output devices.
Although YouTuber My Mate VINCE posted a video highlighting this feature soon after the system launched, it seems like it's only now beginning to permeate fan's collective knowledge base as the community of PS5 owners slowly grows. The Verge recently shared this discovery, soon followed by Screen Rant. But even before reporters spread this knowledge to others, one curious PS5 owner stumbled upon the aforementioned trick themselves.
On November 12, 2020, the day the PS5 hit retailers in many parts of the world, a Redditor named Namdnas78 posted about this feature, though the discovery didn't seem to draw much attention. Namdnas78 came upon the system-wide mute by sheer accident, simply due to its proximity to the home button. One person in the comments claimed that the function "was mentioned a while back," though the original poster had heard nothing about it before, and it seems as though many others are figuring it out fairly late in the game (no pun intended).
For anyone keeping track of the advantages the PS5 has over the Xbox Series X|S, this can be added to the list. Now that more people are uncovering the nearly forgotten feature, one has to wonder what other tricks were quietly packed into the PS5 that have yet to be found. Are there other innovations that have either been either uncovered? Or perhaps some that were actually announced, but were totally missed by Sony fans. If you're a lucky PS5 owner, you might want to start digging around to see if there were any other features that went unnoticed.