Paired‐comparison judgments of intelligibility of speech in noise were obtained from eight hearing‐impaired subjects on a large number of hearing aids simulated by a digital master hearing aid. The hearing aids which comprised a 5×5 matrix differed systematically in the amount of low‐frequency and high‐frequency gain provided. A comparison of three adaptive strategies for determining optimum hearing aid frequency‐gain characteristics (an iterative round robin, a double elimination tournament, and a modified simplex procedure) revealed convergence on the same or similar hearing aids for most subjects. Analysis revealed that subjects for whom all three procedures converged on the same hearing aid showed a single pronounced peak in the response surface, while a broader peak was evident for the subjects for whom the three procedures identified similar hearing aids. The modified simplex procedure was found to be most efficient and the iterative round robin least efficient.