A study has been made of the influence of transient and intermodulation distortion on the transmission of speech occurring in the presence of a background noise having pronounced transient characteristics (cafeteria noise). This paper describes objective measurements of the power‐time distribution in speech and noise, separately and in combination, for the sound coming from a sound source of high quality and for the sound coming from the earphones of hearing aids whose microphones were exposed to the sound source. The nature of the transmitted signal will be demonstrated. (This work was carried out under sponsorship of Veterans Administration.)