A synthesis methodology for selecting locations of thez-domain poles for noise-shaping coders that use multibit internal converters is presented. A key aspect of the proposed methodology is the use of the |L|₁ norm of the noise transfer function to guarantee stability rather than the power gain or |L|₂ norm which is commonly used in the design of 1-bit noise-shaping coders. Simulation verifies that the performance predicted by the new method is within a few dBs of the actual performance. In addition, two hand-designed loop filters from the literature are compared with designs generated by the proposed method.