A signal compression system includes a coder and a decoder. The coder includes an extract unit for extracting an input feature vector from an input signal, a coder memory unit for storing a predesigned vector quantization (VQ) table for the coder such that the coder memory unit uses a set of primary indices to address entries within the pre-designed VQ table, a coder mapping unit for mapping indices from a set of secondary indices to the first set of indices, and a search unit for searching for one index out of the set of secondary indices, wherein the index from the set of secondary indices corresponds to an entry in the coder memory unit, and the entry best represents the input feature vector according to some predetermined criteria. On the decoder side, the decoder includes a decoder memory unit for storing the same pre-designed VQ table and set of primary indices as the coder memory unit, a decoder mapping unit, and a retrieval unit, wherein the entry indicated by the index best represents the input feature vector.