If it's just through a cheap speaker and mic, you'll probably lose a lot of the image. This uses a linear frequency scale (which is just the nature of Fourier

If it's just through a cheap speaker and mic, you'll probably lose a lot of the image. This uses a linear frequency scale (which is just the nature of Fourier transforms), whereas our ears are sensitive on a log frequency scale. In other words, the information that's most important to our hearing, which is what a mic & speaker will preserve the best, is in the bottom 10% of the image. A cheap speaker & mic will probably lose a lot of content above about 10 kHz - which is the entire top half of the image. Even though this wouldn't be that huge a difference to our ears, it would sure look bad in the image. As for background noise, the difference would probably look like the difference here: http://www.sweetwater.com/insync/media/2010/09/RXAdv-e-xlarge.jpg http://www.sweetwater.com/insync/media/2010/09/RXAdv-e-xlarg... (that's a screenshot of audio restoration software that removes noise, so it's technically doing the opposite process as best it can, but the difference would be similar).