A multicodebook quantization method for improving the performance of the split vector quantization (SVQ) is described. In the proposed method, multiple codebooks having different sizes are trained, and the minimal-size codebook and its codeword satisfying the condition based on the spectral distortion are determined. Several clustering techniques for reducing total bit rate and the analysis of the computational complexity are also presented. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method reduces the number of outliers significantly and achieves a better rate-distortion performance compared with the fixed-bit-rate SVQ, multistage VQ, and variable-bit-rate SVQ.