Speech intelligibility declines at high intensities for both normally hearing and hearing impaired listeners. However, it appears that this rollover can be minimized and intelligibility preserved by reducing speech in high frequency regions to an array of noncontiguous bands having vertical filter slopes (i.e., rectangular bands) and widths substantially narrower than a critical band. Normally hearing listeners were presented with sentences consisting of a 500-Hz lowpass pedestal band and an array of ten 4% bands spaced at 1/3-octave intervals from 1000 Hz to 8000 Hz. The pedestal band was fixed at 70 dB and the subcritical-band array varied from 55 to 105 dB in peak level. Desired sub-ceiling intelligibility ranged from 80 to 89% and was statistically asymptotic for levels from 75 to 105 dB. The largest intelligibility difference across that range, found between 85 and 105 dB, was just 1.6%. For that same contrast in levels, Molis and Summers [ARLO 4, 124–128 (2003)] obtained a significant intelligibility loss of 26.7% for spectrally continuous highpass speech. It is suggested that subcritical-width bandpass filtering reduces rollover by limiting firing rate saturation to a subset of fibers comprising individual critical bands. Implications for hearing aid construction will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH.]