Why is it (in Australia at least) that after a caller leaves a message on a home answering question, rather than the machine just turning itself off, there are instead three or four annoying “call ended” tones that beep for a five or six seconds, before the next message plays.
It happens with every machine I’ve ever heard here, and although it’s no big deal, if I could find a machine that didn’t do it, I’d buy one!
Is it a phone system thing, or an annoying design oversight?
Cheers
MRR
There are different kinds of answering machines:
-those that use two tapes - one for the outgoing greeting, one for the incoming messages
-those that use one tape, recording the incoming messages on the blank space after the outgoing greeting
-Those that don’t use tapes at all - recording digitally.
The second type - that uses a single tape - must be able to identifty the original outgoing greeting message, so it doesn’t record over it; it must also be able to determine where the recorded incoming messages are, so that it won’t record the second one over the top of the first. So it delimits the recorded items on the tape with beep codes, to make them easy to detect.