If the delay is less than 25 milliseconds, it is almost undetectable to the human ear - in fact, if you ask a user if they hear an echo situation, they will most likely receive a "no" answer. If you believe this is happening, you can tell that the problem is a "delay" - more precisely, the delay between what is said on the outbound link and its reflection on the return link. A line echo can happen in different ways but typically has to do with the device's electrical characteristics when sending, receiving, and intervening.Įven when you are unaware, for the most part, there are many situations where an echo is present in a telephone conversation.Įcho is a problem when it interferes with our understanding of the other person's voice on a phone call or when it confuses the person speaking due to hearing themselves on the line. Secondly, electrical signals traveling on a sending wire are picked up by the adjacent receiving wire (sometimes called line echo).First: the voice coming from the phone's speaker is picked up by the phone's microphone itself (sometimes called acoustic Echo).The Echo is typically created in one of two ways: In a telephony context, Echo is where the same person reflects a person's voice on the outgoing transmission from the microphone of a headset on the return of the transmission to the speaker of the headset. If that's the case, why do headphones sound echoey even when you are in a compact space? When you are talking, the mic sounds echoey when your voice goes into the audio, and the speakers bounce it back due to a fault in the mic or the audio settings in the computer. If the room is smaller, you may not hear your voice clearly, but you will feel the words bumping over each other, usually referred to as reverberation. For instance, if you talk in a large empty room, you will hear your voice coming back to you, echoing. The reason behind an echo is the sound hitting a hard surface, such as a wall, after traveling over a longer distance. Basically, an echo refers to a sound that bounces back to the source.