Turbo codes have received great attention due to their outstanding performance. Unfortunately, a high performance is associated with large transmission delays, prohibiting an application for speech transmission. Hence, the aim of this paper is the comparison of turbo codes employing short interleavers with convolutional codes in terms of bit error rate performance and computational effort. Additionally, a pragmatic approach of bandwidth-efficient turbo-coded modulation is considered. Analyzing the structure of the transmitter and receiver, interesting results are presented concerning the design of the mapper. Furthermore, a new very simple soft-output demodulation algorithm is derived. In order to compare turbo codes with convolutional codes under realistic conditions, both are embedded in a direct sequence (DS) code division multiple access system. Besides this comparison, a compromise between a high coding gain (low code rate) and high direct-sequence spreading is worked out, including the consideration of the turbo-coded modulation scheme. Simulation results indicate that turbo codes with small block interleavers do not outperform conventional convolutional codes. Furthermore, it is shown that for coherent demodulation, low code rates and low DS spreading is superior to high code rates and high DS spreading.