1. A method for operating an encoder that produces a codeword (C) from an input vector (x), the method comprising the steps of: receiving the input vector to be encoded, wherein the input vector comprises speech, audio, image, or video signals; generating a first multi-precision operand (Ψ′ k ) based on the input vector; generating a mantissa operand (M) and an exponent operand (h), wherein the mantissa operand and the exponent operand are representative of a second multi-precision operand (F′(p k ,k)) that is based on the signal vector to be encoded; selecting a portion of the first multi-precision operand to be modified based on the exponent operand; modifying the portion of the first multi-precision operand based on the mantissa operand to produce a modified multi-precision operand (Ψ′ k+1 ); and generating the codeword (c) based on the modified multi-precision operand; wherein the codeword is for use in a corresponding decoder to decode the speech, audio, image, or video signals.