A method and apparatus for receiving data in high-speed applications wherein an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) samples a received signal and a data decoder implemented with a tree search algorithm detects the bits of the sampled data for timing recovery. In some embodiments, a Viterbi detector is implemented to provide accurate bit detection for data output while tree search detected data is used to determine the optimal sampling phase for the ADC. In some embodiments, after the phase acquisition stage of timing recovery has completed, the tree search decoder may decrease the rate of data detection to maintain phase tracking.