A speech bandwidth compression system, which employs voice excitation in conjunction with a Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) parameterization of the vocal tract filter, is described. To generate the excitation signal, the transmitted speech baseband is broadened at the receiver with a nonlinear distorter, and spectrally flattened by means of an adaptive inverse filter whose parameters are obtained through LPC analysis of the distorted baseband. The voice-excited linear prediction (VELP) system has been implemented in real time on the Fast Digital Processor at Lincoln Laboratory. A detailed description of an 8 kbps version of VELP is given. VELP offers promise as a good quality, medium rate speech compression system which, by avoiding the pitch problem, performs relatively well for telephone quality input speech.