Methods and apparatuses of concatenated channel decoding data involving the decoding of soft-channel symbols using a parity-check to generate a plurality of m decoded data symbols according to an (m+1, m) parity check code, and decoding the plurality of m decoded bits according to an (N,K) Reed-Solomon (RS) code over GF (2.sup.m) to provide the data. N is a length, measured in symbols of the RS code, and K is message length measured in symbols.