Heh, at my first startup I used to get members of the audio codec team wandering over when there was a bug. I'd listen to the corrupted playback, draw out the

Heh, at my first startup I used to get members of the audio codec team wandering over when there was a bug. I'd listen to the corrupted playback, draw out the codec block diagram, and point right to the likely error locations. As another commenter mentions, these were all lossy codecs. The character of noise would be very interesting much of the time -- effectively turning the decoder into a synthesizer.