Can the digital recording be cleaned; I get lots of static on a recorded message?

Ms. - I'm so sorry for your loss.
The least difficult and technical way to retrieve the messages to save would be to buy a digital voice recorder as shown here on Amazon.com
Click Here
or any larger store that sells consumer electronics. There's no need for expensive as spending more money would not get you any better quality recordings of your son's messages. The only feature you require is that the device have a USB connection so you could connect it to your PC and save the recordings to your PC hard drive.
Before you start recording messages be aware that because the messages are digital you can replay them as many times as you need to to get the right quality withou causing them any damage.
To start saving the messages you would place the microphone of the digital recorder over the phones speaker on the left side of the phone at about a distance of 4 to 6" to start. The manual for the digital recorder probably would give you specific advice about this.
The recorder works like a minauture tape recorder. To start recording messages press the RECORD button on the digital recorder, a few seconds later hit the phones PLAY/STOP button to begin the message. When the message is finished hit the phones PLAY/STOP button and then the stop button on the recorder. You've recorded the first message. It's a good idea to rewind the recorded message and play it to make sure the quality is adequate (it should not be much different from the original in quality) If it's OK, move on, recording the messages one by one until you are finished.
To save the messages permanently you would plug the recorder into a USB port on your computer and copy the files to the hard drive. As a precaution, please copy the files over to another medium also, either burning them to a CD or DVD or copying them to a USB thumb drive.
I hope this has been helpful. I hope your healing has begun.
Peace, Mikeywaf

Hello this was a great unit, the price was around $150.00 or more but is hard to fine one
I recommend to change Digital they are a lot good models and no more tapes broken or losing you dictation with digital you have a lot time recording and great audio quality for less money here are some.
Is totally except to you is just a recommendation.
http://www.tvps.com/Departments/Digital-Dictation/Digital-Portable-Recorders/Sony.aspx
http://www.tvps.com/Departments/Digital-Dictation/Digital-Portable-Recorders/Olympus.aspx?sortorder=4&page=2

I Don't know of any Olympus proprietory program to remove noise but if you can export it to a .wav format, it can then be edited and cleaned up digitally buy any semi pro sound editing software.such as sony's Sound Forge or cubase? cakewalk. software used for edit old records for conversion to cd may also help here. From there you can then save to cd for playback. If sound editing is beyond you, contact a recording studio or media house that produces commercials, they may be able to help.
Hope this is helpful

The microphone (located inside the unit and faces downward towards the surface below the answering machine) might be defective. One option would be to call into the answering machine and try recording your message that way.

Other than that, there really isn't much you can do for this problem other than replace the unit.

I have model no. 1188 bellsouth digital answering machine. If you have to leave a message, the message I recorded is no longer there, there is a generic message saying please record your message. How do I go back and record my voice with my message. I cannot find my original manual.

find the recording you want
press the erase button (front of the recorder(top left))
after pressing it let it go
then press it again
that recording is then gone
voila

I had the same problem; see earlier post about record times. The "format" solution worked for me.

There are a number of ways that you could do this that range from secret agent technology to gee-whiz gear that you could hand-build yourself, but it sounds to me as if you just want to preserve the message and place it on your new phone (grin) so let us keep it simple.

Any Radio Shack can sell you a suction-cup mic that will plug into any recording device including the sound in jack on your computer. These are cheap, and best of all make very good recordings as long as there is not a lot of background nose in the room you are recording from.

Buy one, attach it to a regular phone handset and call your house. Just before the announce message begins to play, start recording. When it finishes, stop recording.

If you did this with a digital voice recorder you can simply play it back to your new answering machine while it is in message record mode. You might want to MP3 the recording so you have it forever as well...

IT WORKED, JUST LET IT STAY REGULAR