Abstract: Method disclosed is used for compressing the four quantization per subband tables used in MPEG1 layer 2 audio to minimize a required memory size. The method also describes how to decode the compressed tables and use the data to maximize efficiency when reading the audio samples from the input stream, de-grouping and requantization of the audio samples. The efficiency of this method is suitable for use with the implementation of a RISC/micro-processor based MPEG1 layer 2 audio decoder. Specifically, each of the quantization per subband tables are compressed into tables containing a number of parts. Each of the parts being the compressed format of one column. The parts consist of three pairs of data. The first data value of the pair define the subband up to which the nbits value remains the same (subband marker). For the first pair, the nbits remains constant for all subbands from zero to the subband marker.