1. A fixed rata data encoder which compresses a fixed number of input samples into a fixed number of bits, comprising: a quantization logic configured to quantize a sample; a coding logic configured to receive the quantized sample, the coding logic including a fixed length coding logic and fixed length codes and an entropy coding logic, wherein the fixed length coding logic is configured to encode the quantized sample using the fixed length codes which are designed to assign a codeword with a fixed code length to a subset of input symbols and the code lengths for each sample in the packet are chosen such that when fixed length coding is used to encode the fixed number of input samples the resulting number of bits is less than or equal to the number of bits assigned to each packet, and the entropy coding logic is configured to encode the quantized sample when not all the quantized samples are from the subset of symbols that are assigned to a fixed length code; and a packet builder, communicatively coupled to the coding logic, configured to build a packet with the encoded samples.