The effect of the signal‐to‐noise ratio (S/N) on speech discrimination was measured for two
types of hearing‐aid amplification,(1) full‐range multichannel compression with eight
independent frequency bands and (2) frequency‐equalized linear amplification. Signal‐to‐
noise ratios from− 5 to 15 dB with speech‐spectrum noise (at 70 dB SPL) and two voices
(male and female) were used. The effect of S/N differed for the two aid types: As the S/N
decreased, speech discrimination became relatively better with the multichannel …