Military vehicles are designed for maximum capabilities in areas of performance, armament, and endurance. Acoustic noise suppression at the source is not considered in the system design because of its degradation on performance, as well as its cost impact. Therefore, it is left to the crew helmet to provide for the hearing protection of the crew member. In order to protect the hearing and improve the job performance of the crew, there are two major noise paths to be considered: first is the noise pickup by the communication microphone, along with the speech communication; second is the environmental noise that penetrates the earcup. It is believed that additional improvements to such devices as noise canceling microphones and earcup/transducer assemblies have reached their practical limits. Therefore, research efforts are presently being conducted to incorporate active speech processing for rejecting noise picked up by the communication microphone, and active noise reduction to reduce the environmental noise penetrating the earcup. These efforts will be discussed, along with new types of test equipment and evaluation procedures that have been developed to more accurately evaluate existing communication components and future active speech processing/noise reduction systems.