Also, worth reading about is Turing's Delilah speech encryption system: https://spectrum.ieee.org/alan-turings-delilah
A little bit of analog buffer would help. It wouldn't be a problem for transistor era electronics. You need something like an analog shift register (see "bucket-brigade device"[1]) Those were not developed until the 1970s, and, for a while, appeared in guitar pedals, reverbs, and other simple audio processing devices. If you had to do that with tubes, you'd have a whole rack of tube delay line.
Fun retro electronics project for someone.