Slashdot

This is a follow-up to some JEs a few months ago.

We gave up on the VTech completely after determining that nobody could hear us properly when we used a headset. So this went over to L's parents, who do not use headsets and needed a new phone system, and we went back to the drawing board.

The next thing we tried was the AT&T 56xx series. This is a simple 5.8GHz system that is expandable up to four handsets, and comes with three. It's digital (check), has intercom and conferencing (check), and seems moderately good in build quality (kinda check - it still uses a cheap-calculator type rubber keypad.) There's some eschewing of current fads, as in it uses non-annoying green LEDs rather than red or (*gag*) blue LEDs. Most importantly, the headset jack works fine.

There are some downsides though: the ring styles are all very corporate (and turning it off turns off the intercom ringer too, so you can't get around this by just using a regular phone with a decent ring without losing some of the nicer features); and just as the VTech ran on two frequences, so does the 56xx - but this time then 56xx's other frequency is 2.4GHz. That said, I'm not seeing any evidence it's affected by, or affecting, my 802.11 network, so it's probably ok.

Oh, and it doesn't have an answerphone.

Which means buying a seperate answerphone. Which is ok in a way, except this meant the whole question about answerphones was still unresolved. Here's the problem: in the last seven years, I have bought four, excluding the one built-in to the VTech, answerphone systems. And they all sucked. The first was an AT&T tape-based system, which had reasonable audio quality but took longer and longer to get to the point people could record a message. Despite me deleting messages (and them being supposedly unrecoverable), I suspect the thing was keeping them in some way anyway.

The next was a BellSomething branded unit, which was digital, and couldn't record most accents audibly.

(I wonder why American compressed digital systems have so many problems with accents? Before I got here, I used to think that the whole fuss of uLaw vs A-law et al was to do with "American accents vs Rest-of-world accents", but then I came here and found that Americans are just as varied as, say, the whole of Europe. There's little or nothing in common between New York Italian, New York Jew, Floridian (native), West Virginian, Southern-Black, (add accents here) (then tripple them for different income groups), and for the most part, until very recently, most accents outside of a kind of generic American ok-for-TV not-obviously-north-or-south accent, really had problems being audible on any digital recording equipment.)

The next was a BellSouthing cordless-phone integrated thing, and it too had problems with accents. And it couldn't hold the time and day over powercuts, having no slot for a battery. Power cuts are frequent here.

The final one was a standalone digital system that we had to return twice. This had no battery back-up, and just didn't work at all the first time, and stopped working a few days after we bought it the second.

So I didn't get this new one from any store with "Mart" in the name. I went, instead, to Radio Shack. Because while I know I'll be ripped off at RS, I also know the ripping-off will be exclusively price, not quality related. It's not that you're paying for quality at RS, because quality, by rights, should be cheaper - I suspect their margin on a $40 answering system (yeah, we'll get to that in a second) probably run at $35. But at the same time, I've bought a lot of crap in my time, often from positions of ignorance, and everything I bought from RS has worked "as advertised" - which may have meant it was a con, but it was reliable and did whatever it claimed to do. If Radio Shack sold wooden amplifier knobs, they'd be the best on the market, and you probably would be able to, in a closed room with nothing else but testing equipment, be able to determine they have less affect on the acoustics than a regular plastic knob. They'd also cost $1,500, because that's three times the price they are anywhere else.

So, yeah, I bought a $40 answering system. It takes a 9V battery, so it will not lose the time. It's tiny, even cute, has a green backlight for the LCD, and so far (tests with my voice only), the audio is fine. We'll know when my mother calls, as L. never quite understands my mother as recorded digitally, and I have to admit, I have problems too.

Still waiting for DECT to take off here. Or for 802.11 based systems to become affordable, either will be good as far as I'm concerned.