Four hearing aid prescription methods were compared. A digital master hearing aid was used to produce the prescribed frequency gain characteristics. Measures of speech recognition and paired comparison judgments of relative speech intelligibility and speech quality were obtained at three output levels for each of the experimental frequency gain characteristics. No single prescriptive method emerged as being clearly superior. Relative performance of the four prescriptive methods varied as a function of output level. Similar results were observed for both speech recognition testing and paired comparison testing.