Why do fax machines still make that dial up noise?

Shouldn’t everything be all digital and beeps and boops by now?

Do you mean the touch tone noise or that harsh pink noise that you hear when it engages the other fax machine?

Fax machines still use POTS phone lines, and so must dial using DTMF (Touchtones). They also need to transmit the data over the line in an analog fashion, and to be backwards compatible, they use a standard modem speed negotiation and protocol.

I imagine that the protocol is still the same. Otherwise, new machines wouldn’t be able to converse with older ones.

I doubt there are many left in the West these days.

You can probably turn off the speaker if it bothers you.

Digital faxing is called “email a PDF.”

Fax machines have changed quite a bit since the early days. They used to scan each line and converted it into the fax signal as they scanned it. These days, they scan the entire document, store it digitally, then use the digital copy that they have stored to generate the scan line signals.

When they use the old-fashioned fax protocol, then they still use that protocol’s analog representation of digital signals, which is the dial-up noise that you hear. The initial tones that you hear are the fax machines negotiating their transmit and receive speeds with each other.

Many “fax” machines these days are combo scanner/fax/printer/copier machines, which is really a machine with a scanner, a printer, a phone interface, and often a network interface. Which of those you use depends on what function you are doing (copying is really a scan followed by a print). Most of these machines can scan the document as a pdf and e-mail it. There’s no need to go over the phone line using the old-fashioned fax protocol.

ETA: friedo’s post wasn’t there when I started typing (dang ninjas)

Most machines have a setting that turns off the sound if you don’t appreciate it. The default is for the sound to play for a few seconds before shutting off. I’ve always been grateful for that, as it serves to confirm that a connection has been made to another fax machine and the fax is likely to be transmitted subsequently. Without the confirmation, you might not know until much later, and it’s pretty easy to NOT make a connection (wrong number, busy line, etc.).

Which was also the reason this was the default on dialup modems for a long time. But DSL would be outside of our hearing, so they moved on to using lights instead.

Which, honestly, I’m surprised fax modems didn’t pick up on. Just show a light when you are connected. Heck, you could even show the connection speed if you wanted.

But if you have sound you can hear the obscenities when you have a wrong number and repeatedly dial a human’s phone number; with lights you would just know that you weren’t getting a proper connection.

In the UK at least, faxes are heavily used in law offices. Sure they are low-quality, but when you are sending dozens of multi-page documents a day, it’s a hell of a lot quicker and easier to stick a pile of paper in the fax machine, dial a number, and walk away, than to scan each individual page into a computer and send it by email.

In an office setting, faxes also have the advantage that there is a physical piece of paper which can be seen and dealt with by anyone in the office. Emails tend to get sent to one specific person, who might be ill or on vacation that day, or it could end up in their junk folder and never get seen.

There are scanners that accept piles of paper. In fact the fax machine is one, it’s just what it does with the file that differs from other scanners.

If your business has emails that need to be dealt with even when someone is ill or on vacation you can set up your email system to deal with that.

That’s not to say that fax doesn’t still have its uses in some environments where old routines are important, like in law or business. But the issue isn’t that new technology can’t replace it, it’s that it’s too much hassle to either change the routines or adapt the technology when faxes still work just fine.