Posts on the Alpisto engineering blog filed under #audio.
Small varios beep in a way nobody would call pleasant, and it is not because nobody cared. A piezo disc is a bell with one note of its own, and a vario plays a tune on it by feeding it square waves and letting the bell pick what it likes. I put one in a desk drawer with a microphone: at 1000 Hz the note that was asked for comes out 33 dB below its own third harmonic, loudness swings 16 dB across the tone table, and the obvious way to soften a beep turns out to make it sharper.