Two commercially available single‐channel vibrotactile aids for the heating impaired were compared in tasks using acoustic stimuli of varying levels of complexity. Both devices provide envelope information in an AM signal presented to a single location on the skin; however, one of the devices varies the carrier frequency according to input frequency, providing some additional “spectral” information about the stimulus. Subjects were tested in tasks including sound detection, environmental sound identification, syllable number and stress identification, and phoneme identification of limited‐set vowels and consonants. All stimuli were recorded onto disk and presented through a loudspeaker by computer. Results showed rapid learning of tasks requiring only envelope information (environmental sounds, syllable number and stress), but little or no improvement with training in vowel and consonant identification. No significant differences between the devices were found on any task, suggesting that the additional spectral information provided by one of the devices is not effectively utilized by the tactile system in the absence of visual cues. [Work supported by NSF and NIH.]