An investigation is made of the signal reception of a hydrophone placed in front of an elastic plate backed by a compliant baffle layer. The baffle layer is the compliant tube array modeled by Junger [J. Acoust. Soc. Am.78, 1010 (1985)] to represent a homogeneous, dispersive fluid layer. Noise reduction baffles such as compliant tubes are acoustically soft and thus tend to degrade the signal received. This paper describes the development of a theoretical model for evaluating the signal reception, and a comparison of theoretical results with experimental data is presented.