A multi-carrier transmission system such as a DMT based VDSL system. The system uses orthogonal carriers with high order QAM constellations for the transmission of multiple bits per carrier and symbol. This estimate includes digital receiver and transmitter units with the receiver unit including a symbol detection unit. This system is adapted to determine a parameter for each single carrier with the parameter being indicative of a deviation of a received signal from a corresponding constellation point. It compares the parameter with an upper lower limit and if the parameter is outside the limits, changes the constellation used to modulate the carrier to a neighboring constellation. The symbol detection unit may be used to determine a parameter such as the ratio d2/&sgr;2, where d is the shortest distance between neighboring constellations, &sgr; is a standard deviation and &sgr;2 is the variance of the deviations of the input and output signal values of the symbol detection unit.