A method and apparatus for compression of complex data signals within a telecommunications base station. The method includes representing a sample of a complex value discrete time signal using 2(L−N)−S mantissa bits and 2N+S exponent bits to realize peak output signal to noise ratios over a wider dynamic range compared to a conventional L-bit uniform quantization format. The increases in dynamic range and peak output SNR is achieved without increasing the average number of data bits per sample and with relatively simple computational effort.