When the signal arrives at your radio, your receiver is designed to perform all the previous steps in perfect reverse to unpack the sound. This “un-doing” process happens almost instantly:

1. Demodulation: The radio “listens” to the thousands of slow OFDM carriers and expertly converts them back into a single, high-speed stream of digital bits.
2. De-interleaving & Error Correction: It “unscrambles” the data bits back into their original, logical order. Then, it uses the protective “armor” (the convolutional code) to find and fix any errors that occurred during the journey.
3. Demultiplexing: The receiver “unpacks the box,” digitally separating the audio from the one radio station you want to hear from all the other stations and data services contained within the Main Service Channel.
4. Audio Decoding: Finally, it “adds water to the juice concentrate.” The receiver takes the compressed MPEG-Audio Layer II file and expands it back into the pure, high-quality PCM audio signal that comes out of your speakers.