A receiver for improving the performance of conventional Discrete Multitone Modulation (DMT) based Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) modems, in the presence of noise and/or interference. A demodulator having an FFT followed by a single-tap-per-bin frequency-domain equalizer is augmented by an additional data-path utilizing windowing or pulse shaping. Windowing is done independently for each symbol over the orthogonality interval and efficiently in the time domain or frequency domain. A decision feedback equalizer at the output of the windowed data-path cancels inter-bin-interference created by windowing.