Every watermarking processing needs a detection metric to decide at decoder side whether audio signal content is marked, and which symbol is embedded inside the audio signal content. The invention provides a new detection metric that achieves a reliable detection of watermarks in the presence of additional noise and echoes. This is performed by taking into account the information contained in the echoes of the received audio signal in the decision metric and comparing it with the corresponding metric obtained from decoding a non-marked audio signal, based on calculating the false positive detection rates of the reference sequences for multiple peaks. The watermark symbol corresponding to the reference sequence having the lowest false positive error is selected as the embedded one.