Modern coding and modulation techniques have greatly improved the transmission of signals. A method is described including receiving a stream of data bits, demultiplexing the stream into a first and second substream, encoding the first and second substream using a low density parity check coding process, and mapping the first substream to a first region of a symbol constellation map and the second substream to a second region. Also, an apparatus is described including a demultiplexer that produces a first and second bitstream, a first encoder that encodes the first substream using a low density parity check coding process at a first encoding rate, a second encoder that encodes the second substream at a second rate, and a symbol mapper that maps bits from the first substream to a first region of a symbol constellation map and maps bits from the second substream to a second region.