To achieve high quality speech reconstruction at low bit rates, constraints on position combinations among two or more pulses (403) are implemented. By placing constraints on position combinations, certain combinations of pulses are prohibited which allows the most significant pulses to always be coded, thereby improving speech quality. After all valid combinations are considered, a list of pulse pairs (codebook) which can be indexed using a single, predetermined bit length codeword is produced. The codeword is transmitted to a destination where it is used by a decoder to reconstruct the original information signal.