A fixed-tap differential pulse code modulation (DPCM) system with a robust backward-adaptive Jayant quantizer is investigated for speech encoding at 16-40 kbits/s using binary phase shift keying over an additive white Gaussian noise channel. The performance of this system becomes unacceptable as the channel bit error rate

approaches 10
-2. Using high-rate, long constraint length, self-orthogonal convolutional codes, the DPCM system performance is much-improved for

depending on the transmitted data rate. The use of high-rate

, and 5 codes minimizes the number of bits allocated to channel coding, and decoding complexity is reduced by employing self-orthogonal codes which admit threshold decoding. Subjectively, while there is additional quantization noise with channel coding, the irritating popping and squeaking sounds due to channel errors are eliminated.