A system, wireless device (402) and method receive a set of soft metrics (614) associated with a block of symbols during a predetermined time interval, use the set of soft metrics (614) to form an initial interference power estimate, form a moving-average estimate of interference power (616) corresponding to each predetermined time interval, and scale the set of soft metrics (614) according to the corresponding interference power estimate resulting in a set of scaled metrics (618). Then they limit the dynamic range of the set of scaled metrics (618), linearly quantize the limited metrics, and output the linearly quantized limited metrics (628) to a memory buffer. The size of the memory buffer containing the linearly quantized limited metrics (628) is smaller than the size of a memory buffer required to store the received soft metrics (614). The linearly quantized limited metrics (628) are then used as input to a decoder.