Data obtained in sample-discrimination tasks indicate that subjects place high weight on the lowest and highest frequencies when making judgments concerning the loudness of broadband stimuli. In an effort to determine whether these judgments are truly based on loudness, six subjects with normal hearing were tested in a loudness matching task where the stimuli consisted of 15 bands of noise, each two critical bands wide, or 15 tones at the center frequencies of those noise bands. In addition to comparing all combinations of 15-component noise and 15-component tone stimuli, subjects adjusted the level of 15-component stimuli to equate them in loudness with stimuli missing the lowest, middle or highest component. This was done for stimuli with equal levels for each component and for levels approximating the long term average speech spectrum. Noise stimuli had to be increased by 2.5 dB to be equal in loudness to tonal stimuli. Full bandwidth stimuli had to be decreased in level by 1.4–1.8 dB to be equal in lo...