28. The method of claim 23 , wherein each candidate codevector is a composite codevector including a first component vector and a second component vector.
23. A method of quantizing a vector representative of a portion of a speech or audio signal in an encoder, comprising: (a) determining an error term corresponding to a candidate codevector of a set of candidate codevectors, the error term being a function of the candidate codevector and the vector; (b) determining whether the candidate codevector is legal based upon one or more illegal space definitions, when the error term is better than a current best error term; (c) updating the current best error term with the error term, when the error term is better than the current best error term and the codevector is legal; (d) repeating steps (a), (b) and (c) for all of the candidate codevectors, thereby establishing a best legal candidate codevector corresponding to the best current error term, whereby the best legal candidate codevector corresponds to a quantization of the vector; and (e) transmitting to a decoder a signal representative of the portion of the speech or audio signal based on the best legal candidate codevector.