The answering machine?

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Florentia

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As far as I am concerned, the shatters of the porch light could never be recovered by the Police, and they would surely have liked to take them a glance, to say the least. But I was wondering about Sherrill's recording machine: what happened with it? Was it kept as a piece of evidence? Yesterday, as a technician was cleaning the hard disk in my PC, he was able to recover, by chance, files that I had deleted more than fifteen years ago. He made jokes about the passing of time and the traces that files leave, always vulnerable. So,it immediately came to my mind that perhaps with current new technologies and appliances, it would be possible to rescue those unfortunately an accidentally lost messages from so many Junes ago. Any idea about the destiny this machine had?
 
As far as the globe , Janelle and Mike placed the glass in the dumpster across the street. The tape looks like it is still with police and of right now the contents of the deleted message can't be retrieved. The crime watch daily segment with Kim Goldman is my source. I don't know if in Seville you can get it on YouTube.
 
Thank you very much, Scadagirl28. I have watched the show you mention, but I do not remember anything being said about the keeping of that tape, surely I did not pay enough attention.
Concerning the possibility of retrieving what was deleted, I have asked some friends and acquantainces who are either sound engineers or work in similar fields - specially those related to music and computers- and they are not sure about that retrieving being impossible. I will continue asking.
 
I dont know a lot of specifics so I could be wrong about how they designed voicemail machines. I do know a mechanical mono tape devise is different from digital storage. In digital storage space deleted information isnt fully written over until your computer needs the information for other things. A tape is simpler where you just directly immediately write over the sound that previously occupied that space with new sound.

I think it was a tape based answering machine? Even if it didnt use tapes Id think it would probably be simple and designed before complicated methods of file storage wouldve been applied to a phone.
 
I dont know a lot of specifics so I could be wrong about how they designed voicemail machines. I do know a mechanical mono tape devise is different from digital storage. In digital storage space deleted information isnt fully written over until your computer needs the information for other things. A tape is simpler where you just directly immediately write over the sound that previously occupied that space with new sound.




I think it was a tape based answering machine? Even if it didnt use tapes Id think it would probably be simple and designed before complicated methods of file storage wouldve been applied to a phone.

I had the same assumption, but my knowledge on digital or mechanical storage is very poor indeed, and these friends have told me tha, despite what you assert, it would not be impossible to recover that content from the machine. Surely, it would not be easy either, but the possibility can not be ruled out.
 
I had the same assumption, but my knowledge on digital or mechanical storage is very poor indeed, and these friends have told me tha, despite what you assert, it would not be impossible to recover that content from the machine. Surely, it would not be easy either, but the possibility can not be ruled out.

Even if it is possible you'd also have to find an expert knowledgable enough to extract the information. Despite how many specialists there are in every field there's probably a shrinking amount of voice recorder specialists.
 
I think those old cassette tapes had a magnetic strip on them. This allowed the user to erase old material and use it again. This one of the reasons you don't put magnets near computers. There are obviously variables here. The age of the tape. how many people called and left messages afterwards etc. We don't know.
 
I think a tape would work the same as a hard drive on a computer. Rather then erase, it would rewind, and get ready for write over. On a tape, even if written over there would still be a chance of recovering some or all the info if it had not been writen over too many times. It's kinda like writing on a note pad, and you can lift the paper and see the writing imprints underneath.

On the other hand if the machine used a digital chip, then that would pose a problem, because a chip is much different then a hard drive or tape recorder .

Little note : a computer hard drive is nothing more then a little miniature record player. Instead of a needle, you have a laser light to read the info. The disk instead of being made of vinyl , it is made of aluminum.
 
Ibiz, the first part of your explanation was what -in a broad sense- my friends told me. They even speculated about the type of answering machine that was. The rest of their assertions were quite technical and I could not follow them, of course. It is true that they affirmed only very skilled technicians could recover those old messages.
Apart from that possibilty, when I told them about the case, they agreed on the fact that despite the deleting,it would have been easy for the police to get information about that call, specially as regards the place where it was sent from. In their opinion, though nowadays technologies have improved considerably and they are more precise than ever, as there is an overexistence of phone lines, identification used to be simpler decades ago, when saturation was absent. Besides, they added it is always easy to trace a land line phone call.
 
Yes I remember it was just a few years before that *69 came out. You could trace back a call by dialing *69, but it would cost you a $1.00. I don't remember if calling I'd came out shortly after, but I think that was about $3.00 a month, and you had to purchase a little box that attached to your phone line.

As I said before if the answering machine was the new wave digital chip, then I don't think the message could be recovered, but I will do a google search, and see what I can find out.
 
OK, I just came from an electronics forum, and found that messages from digital machines can be recovered. I don't know about 1992, but here's how one guy did it in 2016.

Success! The messages have been recovered. Through a friend of Karlin‘s I got to work on this project and I will post a quick summary describing the procedure we followed.
open the answering machine and desolder the AT45DB321B flash memory chip.
The flash chip has an SPI interface; we connected it to the GPIO of a Raspberry PI to clock out all the data and save it to a file using a Python script to bit-bang the data out.

The Python script essentially sent the following bytes: [0xe8, 0x80, 0x04, 0x01, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0] which tells the flash chip to send us the data in continuous mode starting at the first register in the first page of memory. After that, each cycle of the clock outputs the next bit from the chip for the entire contents of the chip (4,325,376 bytes specifically) before rolling over and starting at the first register again.
The audio format seems to be a form of the G.721 format.
Install Vox Studio by xentec(I can't post links so google for it) and open the file as a Elan Informatique 32K ADPCM @ 8000 Hz sampling frequency then save as a WAV or whatever floats you boat.
If you don't want to pay $500 for Vox Studio you can do this, download g72x++.tar.bz2 (I can't post links so google for it) unpack and compile with build.sh. Use it with this string of commands in Bash:
cat <Raw data file> | decode-g72x -64 -u -L | sox -r 8000 -b 8 -c 1 -e u-law -t raw - -t wav <output file> ; cat <output file> | sed 's/\x0\x0\x0\x0//g' > tmp ; mv tmp <output file>

Now, the question is: did Sherrell have a digital machine or a tape machine?
 
Great research, Ibiz! However, considering that everything in this case seems loose and strange, I bet it is not going to be possible to know what exact type of answering machine Sherrill had. Truth to say, I even doubt that the appliance is being properly kept by the police.
I wonder if relatives and those close to the victims have never thought about this. If so, we do not know, of course, but if they have not, I still continue thinking that "negligence" is very odd.
 
I thought this as well. Who's to say police would have even kept the machine. It's not like they would have had the hindsight to know what could be done in 2016.
 
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