been worked out by several authors [@BS95; @Fin92; @FC93; @BS94; @Kr; @CF94; @KLM93; @PW95], for the case of ‘high’ SNR and for the Newtonian and post-Newtonian waveforms using a single and a network of detectors. In [@BSD96] exhaustive Monte Carlo numerical simulations were carried out to compute the errors in the estimation of parameters and covariances among them, for the case of the initial LIGO configuration taking into account only the first post-Newtonian corrections and assuming circular orbits. It was found that the errors as obtained from the simulations were larger by a factor of two or more from the errors as computed via the covariance matrix at astrophysically relevant SNRs. The discrepancy disappears as the SNR increases beyond certain value - typically 15 in the Newtonian case and 25 in the post-Newtonian case. The comparision with other less stringent lower bounds has also not resolved the discrepancy. Nicholson and Vecchio [@NV97] have recently computed Bayesian bounds such as the Weiss-Wainstein and Ziv-Zakai, for the case of Newtonian signals. They conclude that though these bounds are tighter than the Cramer-Rao bound, the numerical errors are still much larger than the computed lower bounds.

In this paper we explain the discrepancy 