The coder is a dynamic bit allocation sub-band coder of the type first proposed by Ramstad (1982). It is structured in such a way that the relative importance of all bits is established as a byproduct of the dynamic bit allocation. It is shown that there is a difference in error sensitivity of four orders of magnitude between the most and the least important bits of the bit stream on average. A very flexible unequal error protection scheme is used to match the error sensitivity of the sub-band coder bit stream. This is accomplished using the concept of rate compatible punctured convolutional coding. The resulting coder gives robust performance over a simulated noisy channel. Its nominal bit rate is 16 kb/s, with 12 kb/s assigned for speech coding and 4 kb/s assigned for error correction. The entire encoder and decoder have been implemented on a single AT&T DSP-32 digital signal processor. >