No not really. It was the crank that turned the piston that compressed the air in the first place, so no gain there only a net loss.
Mate, are you serious?
The losses incurred by compressing the air have nothing to do with it, because that energy is regained... - ie, if you ignore any fuel going into the engine, if more energy is used to compress the air, at the top of the cycle there is more energy to push the piston down. Compressing an air charge with a piston is like a squashing a spring - you get back what you put in (ignoring friction losses).
I think you are just trying to shoot me down because I said you comments about volumetric efficiency didn't answer the original post.
You can argue all you like, but I have a physics degree and the principles of thermodynamics have been unchallenged for a few hundred years.
A certain amount of available energy enters the engine in the form of fuel. A heat engine converts this into three types of energy - sound, heat and useable work.
The sound is such a tiny percentage it can be ignored. As a result, the efficiency of an engine is essentially a function of how much waste heat it DOESN'T produce. The difference in heat between the air entering the front of the engine compared to the heat of the exhaust air is proportional to the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine.
QJB, if my previous posts didn't make sense... you might as well start here.
Thermal efficiency - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia