Why does my Mac mini (2018) have no startup sound?

Question

My Mac mini (2018) has a speaker that works well for playing music and making user interface sound effects. But I do not hear a startup chime when booting the machine.

In other words, I have the exact opposite problem of this Question, Mac Mini: No sound except for startup chime

Is there a way to restore the traditional startup sound?

Answer 1

Apple has removed the startup chime from all the Mac models starting from Late 2016.

• About Mac startup tones

Mac models from early 2016 and earlier make a chime sound when they start up. Mac models from late 2016 and newer don't have a startup chime, with the exception of MacBook Air (13-inch, 2017).

Answer 2

See this TidBITS article.

Basically, on some systems, you can re-enable the startup chime with this Terminal command:

sudo nvram BootAudio=%01

On later systems, this might work:

sudo nvram StartupMute=%00