A telecommunication MIMO receiver implements soft bit metric calculation with direct matrix inversion MIMO detection. The receiver has a detector that detects data symbols in a received signal by determining distances between received signal points and constellation points; a scaler that scales the distances using a scaling factor; and a soft bit metric calculator that uses the scaled distances to calculate scaled soft bit metrics. The receiver can also have a decoder that decodes the soft bit metrics to determine data values in the received signals. Preferably, the receiver also has a quantizer that dynamically quantizes the soft bit metrics before decoding by the decoder.