This paper presents a new objective measure for speech quality testing to be used with speech coding systems. This measure is presented in the context of an ongoing 15‐year study of objective measures for speech quality. As part of this research, well over 3000 measures have been evaluated in a study that has done well over a million separate correlation analyses. Included in the study were parametric forms of virtually all commonly used objective measures as well as a large number of new, complex composite measures. The new objective speech quality measure to be presented is a composite measure based on the line spectrum pair (LSP) decomposition of the linear predictive coding (LPC) polynomial. The measure is intended specifically to be used for the design of LPC quantizers for use in a wide variety of speech coding systems. This new measure is the first measure developed in this research that has both very high performance in terms of its ability to predict listener subjective responses as well as the properties necessary to be used explicitly in the design of LPC quantizers.