Abstract: A system comprises a refined psycho-acoustic modeler for efficient perceptive encoding compression of digital audio. Perceptive encoding uses experimentally derived knowledge of human hearing to compress audio by deleting data corresponding to sounds which will not be perceived by the human ear. A psycho-acoustic modeler produces masking information that is used in the perceptive encoding system to specify which amplitudes and frequencies may be safely ignored without compromising sound fidelity. The present invention includes a refined approximation to the experimentally derived individual masking spread function, which allows superior performance when used to calculate the overall amplitudes and frequencies that may be ignored. The present invention also includes an enhanced tonal component determiner, which allows for the more accurate identification of significant tonal components.