A method and apparatus reliably encode and decode information over a communication system. The method includes transforming two coefficients into two pairs of random variables, one random variable in each pair having substantially equal energy as one random variable in the other pair. The method further includes quantizing each of the pairs of random variables and entropy coding each quantized random variable separately creating an encoded bitstreams. The encoded bitstreams are received by a decoder which first determines which channels of the communication system are working. The encoded bitstream is entropy decoded, inversed quantized and inversed transformed. An inverse transform performs three different transformations depending upon which channels are working, i.e., whether the first, second or both channels are working.