[retrac]

> record a real telephone in the US and accurately capture the feeling of a long-distance call

Aside from the signalling, it would be tricky to mimic the tinny hollow sound that came on a long-distance analog connection. Sideband modulation used to reduce the bandwidth, which requires an accurate local oscillator to reconstruct, lest the voice acquire a hint of Donald Duck. Hundreds of channels each separated by a few hundred Hz of gap, all slightly bleeding into each other, the warble of modems and murmur of other speakers making noise that's not exactly white noise in the background, a propagation delay of tens of milliseconds producing an audible electronic echo/ringing, etc. Lots of people at the time would have been familiar with that sound, and it would have been hard to fake.