Trying to kill several birds with one missive, (so I have an excuse for a miss), Lukas did a good job giving an idea of how you can define sounds without hearing them. In the case of Latin, defining sounds of words is easier due to the fact the Classical Latin was almost perfectly phonetic.
To you and Cap Kiwi, I have to apologize for the fact that I can't cite a book or other work with specifics; it's been nearly 40 years since I graduated from college (where I read stuff in Latin almost daily, not because I was a Classics scholar, but because my field was medieval lit. and history, so of course you always had to go to the original text of works which were very often in Latin.
And yes, there are regional variations on Late Latin pronunciation and no doubt always have been, which I'm sure accounts for the fact that Latin morphed into a number of distinct Romance languages instead of into only one. I first became aware of the fact that not all Latin pronuncations are equal when I listened to a recording of the Bach B-min. Mass sung (in Latin, of course) by a choral group from an eastern European country (I forget which, after all these years) who pronounced soft C like TS, which is how C (with no diacritical mark) is pronounced in Serbo-Croat.