1. A method for ultra-low latency compression and decompression for a general-purpose audio input signal, including: formatting the audio input signal into a plurality of time-domain blocks having boundaries; forming an overlapping time-domain block by prepending a fraction of a previous time-domain block to the current time-domain block: transforming each time-domain block to a transform domain block comprising a plurality of coefficients; partitioning the coefficients of each transform domain block into signal coefficients and residue coefficients; quantizing the signal coefficients for each transform domain block and generating signal quantization indices indicative of such quantization; modeling the residue coefficients for each transform domain block as stochastic noise and generating residue quantization indices indicative of such quantization; formatting the signal quantization indices and the residue quantization indices for each transform domain block as an output bit-stream; decoding the output bit stream into quantization indices and residue quantization indices; applying an inverse quantization algorithm to the quantization indices to generate signal coefficients; applying an inverse transform to the signal coefficients to generate a time-domain reconstructed signal waveform; applying a stochastic noise synthesis algorithm to the residue quantization indices to generate a time-domain reconstructed residue waveform; combining the reconstructed signal waveform and the reconstructed residue waveform as a reconstructed input signal waveform block; and applying a boundary synthesis algorithm to the reconstructed input signal waveform block to generate an output signal having substantially reduced boundary discontinuities.