In this paper the performance of soft interference cancellation in synchronous multiuser channels is investigated. Two-stage detection with decorrelator in the first stage is considered. Soft first stage tentative decisions are formed by means of a multilevel quantizer or linear clipper. The asymptotic multiuser efficiency (AME) is used as a performance measured for optimization of the nonlinearity. It is shown, for the two-user case, that soft interference cancellation by means of an optimized linear clipper achieves the AME of the maximum likelihood detector if the crosscorrelation of the signature waveforms is less than $$1/\sqrt 2 $$ . For the K-user case, novel upper bounds on the AME for two-stage detectors with feedback interference cancellation, with both hard and soft tentative decisions, are obtained. The derived bounds are used to examine the performance of two-stage detectors in a cellular scenario.