When pulse‐echo methods are used to measure sound velocity and attenuation, a lack of parallelism between the sound generator and the reflector causes an interference envelope to be superimposed upon the echo train if the attenuation is low. This envelope is calculated for nonzero attenuation and several transducer‐reflector configurations: (a) a tilted reflector with pistonlike sound generation, (b) a tilted reflector with an initial nonuniform amplitude distribution on the transducer, and (c) a spherically curved reflector and a nonzero beam deviation. In each case expressions are obtained for the echo envelope, for the positions of the maxima and minima and for corrections to measurements of sound velocity and attenuation. The results are applied to data taken with samples of solid helium.