A study is reported which examined the efficiency of human observers in the detection of a stimulus waveform which is a train of damped sinusoids. The signal duration and degree of damping (or spectral bandwidth) were varied, with the energy of the signal held constant. Increased bandwidth is shown to decrease detection of relatively long duration signals. A negligible effect of bandwidth was found for short durations. Detection of an amplitude difference, in contrast to detection of the presence of weak signal in noise, is shown to be relatively unaffected either by signal duration or bandwidth over the range of values studied.