Perceptually discarded information can never be recovered by decoding

Evidence

Note that although the decoder stage works in reverse to provide real audio levels at the levels quantized by the coder, it cannot restore the information that has been thrown away by the encoding quantizer. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 2582

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s treatment of masking and critical bands in earlier chapters — masking is precisely the mechanism that licenses this one-way, non-recoverable deletion of signal content.