Improving speech intelligibility via noise reduction outweighs equivalent improvement of the target signal.

Evidence

SRTs were not symmetrical as the SNR was varied up or down with the same amount. The benefit was greater when the filtered part of the noise decreased rather than when the filtered part of the target increased. This result questions the uniformly distributed importance over the [‑15; + 15] interval adopted by the SII and suggests that a greater importance should be attributed to positive SNRs compared to negative SNRs. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3536

Categorization

• XREF: Chimes with general perceptual asymmetry literature (loss aversion and signal/noise asymmetry) and SII critique tradition. — connects to: Improving the SNR by reducing noise helps speech more than raising the target.; Speech intelligibility saturates beyond certain signal-to-noise ratio bounds. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3538; Speech intelligibility gains more from reducing masker energy than from increasing target energy (+3 more)
• SHARE: Send to anyone modeling audiometric thresholds — the practical asymmetry between masking relief and target boost matters clinically.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3536

Broader Connections

• Speech intelligibility gains more from reducing masker energy than from increasing target energy #corroborates (0.95)
• Speech intelligibility saturates beyond certain signal-to-noise ratio bounds. #qualifies (0.80) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3538
• Noise suppression algorithms can degrade speech quality in non-stationary noise #complicates (0.75) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2452