The present invention relates to a multi-channel IM-DD optical transceiver comprising at least one transmitter and a receiver, and a method for equalizing input samples at an adjusted sampling phase using a quality parameter linearly proportional to a BER. The data transmission and reception use a single master channel and slave channels, which have a baud rate equal to or lower than the baud rate of the master channel. A reliable and identical clocking of all the channels is obtained through either the receiver clock of the master channel when they are received from a single transmitter or a reference clock whose frequency is higher than the highest clock frequency amongst all the channels when they are received from a combination of transmitters. An enhanced timing recovery circuit is also provided to select optimized finite impulse response filters, calculate filter coefficients and generate the receiver clock of the master channel.