I am wondering if there is any way of easily and quickly muting the sound on the columbus from the steering wheel. On the octavia courtesy car I had last week a quick press of the volume scroll wheel woudl mute the bolero. However in my superb I have the voice command system so pressing the vol scroll wheel activates this system.

If i have the columbus set to display the map and I have music playing in the background how do I mute the music without turning the whole system off -on the bolero a quick push of the main power button also muted the system and a longer push turned it off. on my columbus a quick push of the power button turns all the power off.

just wondering if my system is functioning as designed and I will just have to live with it or if there is an error ?

It is functioning as intended. When GSM3 set is installed on a car with the multifunction steering wheel the GSM PTT (voice commands) function overrides the setting for the left scroll button on the steering wheel, so you loose the original functionality of short click (un)muting the sound and long click of turning on/off the radio in exchange for (de)activation of the PTT system It is described in the manual where functioning of the GSM is described. Tho I'm sure if you are willing to experiment it would be possible to re-program this function back (not sure how you would activate PTT then).

seems odd that you lose the functionality for long and short click on the columbus unit button. i can understand why you dont have it on the steering wheel. its not a major problem - just confuses me from time to time as I often dont use the car for a week as my wife is the main user (i get to use the Audi A4 Cabriolet so its not all that bad !!)

I guess that their thinking was that you need to mute only when you get phone call, and since activation of PTT mutes the sound anyway, you don't need to do so manually ... but that's just a wild guess. Plus it's easy to just slide your thumb over the scroll wheel to get sound down this way if you really need to put it down quickly.

I have the same problem, in my 2010 Octavia the bolero had a mute by pushing the volume scroll wheel, now i have a 2012 Superb with the Columbus both of which i thought were upgrades but now i'm not so sure.

I guess once i get used to it it'll be ok.

On the older Octy wheel I have you can re-programme the steering controller with VCDS so the PTT button acts as a mute button instead.  I imagine it is also possible on the newer controllers in your cases if you can get it hooked up.