Relationship of pure-tone averages to speech reception threshold for male and female speakers.

The availability of a compact disc with a female speaker for clinical use has raised the issue of the equivalence between the female speaker and the previous standard male speaker for assessing the speech reception threshold (SRT). This study evaluated the relationship of two- and three-frequency averages to the SRT for a male speaker on an audio tape and a female speaker on a compact disc in two similar groups of clinic patients, each consisting of 215 ears. There were no significant differences between the SRTs for the two groups, suggesting that the two speakers/recordings are equivalent for clinical purposes. The SRTs from both speakers/recordings were within 6 dB of both the two- and three-frequency averages. There were no significant differences between the SRTs and the three-frequency average.