Reminds me of Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight. In addition to the hi-fi recording lines, there was basically a phone line designed to allow the sound engineer in the booth and the musician(s) to talk 2-way. Collins liked the effect it gave so they rigged up a way to pipe that audio into the desk. It gives his vocal performance a distant, numb feeling that reinforces the theme of antipathy. Because the equipment was worse.
I'll tell another one: The first time I ever heard The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it was an mp3 my father downloaded. He managed to find a version that sounded like it was taped off of the radio and then the tape played into the PC capturing at a low bitrate. It's my definitive version of the track; the result sounds foggy and mysterious like it's being played from somewhere in the fog across the lake, it bolsters the legend of the piece.