When it fully unveiled thePlayStation Portal(formerly Project Q) in August 2023, PlayStation made an interesting set of announcements about the audio side of its gaming console hardware.
Alongside a couple of new products (the PlayStation Pulse Explore and Pulse Elite) it talked about how these will take advantage of a new technology to connect to yourPS5- PlayStation Link.
What is PlayStation Link?
PlayStation Link is a new wireless audio connectivity standard that PlayStation has created. It’s proprietary and promises some nice upgrades over the existing way that headphones connect.
The new system is not backwards compatible, so headsets that you already own are unlikely to work with it, and it’ll bring a new wireless dongle to plug into your PS5, called a PlayStation Link USB adapter. This will be sold separately.
The PlayStation Portal sounds like it will have PlayStation Link built in for lossless low-latency audio since it won’t have Bluetooth connectivity in any shape or form.
How does PlayStation Link work?
We don’t yet know exactly how PlayStation Link works - its tech hasn’t been fully detailed by PlayStation yet, and might not be really understood until we get some of the new hardware in hand.
However, from the sounds of what it brings, it’s a smart new system that upgrades the Wi-Fi connection that some headsets already use with their included dongles.
This will allow multi-device connections, for one thing, so that you can have both the PS5 and your phone connected to your headset at one time. Some headsets already offer this, but do so with a separate Bluetooth connection managed on the headset itself.
Sony says that PlayStation Link will work on PS5, Portal, PC and Mac, meaning it could be a useful tool for PC gamers even if they don’t have a PS5, since its audio connectivity sounds pretty robust.
What products work with PlayStation Link?
However, the only audio products that we know will definitely launch with PlayStation Link support are the Pulse Explore earbuds and Pulse Elite headset, from Sony itself.
That’s on top of the PlayStation Portal, which will have it built in but only accessible with one of those two audio options.
It says that third parties will have access to the codec to include PlayStation Link in their headsets, though, and we’d assume this means we’ll get a wave of new headset variants from reliable producers like SteelSeries and Razer in the next year or so.
