LPC (Linear Predictive Coding) speech is characterized by several types of degradation which limit both the intelligibility and naturalness of the reconstructed speech. The present paper reports the results of systematic investigations into the information‐bearing elements of the residual waveform (i.e., the error signal obtained by inverse filtering the input speech waveform using the predictor coefficients). Using computer‐aided manual stylization of the residual waveform, we find that it is possible to produce very high quality LPC speech. The traditional LPC “buzziness” can be completely eliminated, as can the monotone, synthetic quality of the reconstructed speech. If the temporal location of the important speech events in the residual (e.g., pitch pulses, noise bursts) is faithfully reproduced at the synthesizer, intelligibility is not significantly impaired. Furthermore, if a pitch pulse extracted from a residual waveform from the talker's voice is used as the excitation source for the voiced speech segments, the resulting speech is perfectly natural and possesses the bassy, resonant quality of natural speech. The implications for the design of LPC coders are discussed.