This paper considers a multicast scenario and compares the average reception quality obtained when combining multiple description coding (MDC) and network coding (NC). Plain (single description) network coding (NC-SDC) serves as reference. In the considered scenario, a single source is multicast to several receivers with various channel conditions. Contrary to a NC-SDC scheme, unable to recover the coded packets when not enough combinations of packets have been received, NC of MDC packets allows a more progressive quality improvement with the number of received packets, and a reduction of the effect of the quantization noise when MDC is performed via frame expansion before quantization. Considering a probability distribution for the bit transition probability during transmission to any user in the multicast group, the expected signal-to-noise ratio is evaluated. Performance comparisons are made for various error distributions, field sizes, and MDC methods (via frame expansion and correlating transform).