bit stream 112 is finally constructed for example through a multiplexer and comprises the lower layer s including coding parameters 113 from the speech specific codec 103 and the upper layer s including the transform coefficients 110 as masked and quantized by the transform modifier and quantizer 111 fig2 is a schematic block diagram of a non restrictive illustrative embodiment of the method and device according to the present invention for coding an input sound signal in at least one lower layer and at least one upper layer of an embedded codec while reducing a quantization noise in the context of an ev vbr codec wherein an internal sampling frequency of 12 8 khz is used for coding the lower layer s referring to fig2 an input sound signal 201 is coded in two or more layers in the lower layer or layers i e in the at least one lower layer a resampler 202 resamples the input sound signal 201 originally sampled at a first input sampling frequency usually of 16 khz at a second sampling frequency of 12 8 khz the spectrum for example the power spectrum of the resampled sound signal 203 in the log domain is computed through a log power spectrum calculator 204 the resampled sound signal 203 is also coded through a speech specific acelp codec 205 to produce coding parameters 219 the speech specific acelp.