This paper presents an audio compression method based on wavelets sub-band quantization and coding, and proposes a coder based on that method. The proposed coder uses the wavelets packets transform in order to obtain the critical bands of the human auditory system. Some results of the MPEG-layer 2 psychoacoustic model are used in the wavelets coefficients coding. The MPEG results are transformed to the wavelet domain in order to determinate the quantizer type and the quantization levels number for each wavelet sub-band. The transform method of these results is also proposed. The coder uses scalar and vector quantization methods according with the sensibility of the human auditory system for each wavelet sub-band. The entropy coding is also used in order to improve the performance of the proposed coder. The results of the subjective evaluation demonstrate that the proposed coder achieve transparent coding of the monophonic CD signals at bit rates of 80-96 Kbit/seg.95610621