Masking vs Notching: What's the Difference and Which to Choose
Adding a background sound and cutting a narrow band around your tone are two different roads to the same goal. Here's how each one works and when to choose one over the other.
Last reviewed: September 23, 2026
Anyone who starts looking into background sound for ringing in the ears eventually runs into two words that get used as if they were synonyms, and they aren’t: masking and notching. Both aim at the same goal — making the ringing stop being the one thing that stands out — but they get there by opposite routes. It’s worth understanding the difference before choosing, because it isn’t a minor technical detail: it changes how the session sounds and how much volume you need for it to work.
Masking: Adding a Sound That Competes for Your Attention
Masking is addition. You add a background sound — broadband, even, continuous — and that new sound occupies the space where your attention was going to go looking for the ringing. It doesn’t erase it: it makes it less relevant, like turning on a light bright enough that the previous one stops being noticeable. We wrote about this idea in more detail in masking is not covering up, because the most common mistake is thinking you have to raise the volume until everything is drowned out, when masking actually performs better at the lowest volume that achieves the blend.
Notching: Cutting Instead of Adding
A notched filter does the opposite. Instead of adding a new sound, it takes the background sound that’s already playing and cuts a very narrow band out of it, centered exactly on your tone. The rest of the spectrum stays intact. In what a notched sound filter is we cover how that cut gets built and why the center has to be yours: a notch off-frequency stops making sense, because it cuts something that wasn’t bothering you and lets through what was.
What They Have in Common, and Where They Diverge
The two modes share a starting point: neither one erases the ringing, both work on how your ear distributes attention among the sounds it receives. The difference is in the mechanism. Masking adds new sound energy; notching removes a specific slice of what was already there. That’s why masking tends to sound more “present” — there’s a recognizable background sound, like rain or pink noise — while notching, in general, sounds almost identical to any other continuous background sound, with no obvious sign that anything was removed.
Which One Fits What You’re After
If you also need to cover unpredictable outside noise — street traffic, a conversation in the next room — masking tends to be more direct, because it adds a steady floor of sound that competes with that. If instead you’re after something that sounds as close as possible to silence itself, without adding a new texture to pay attention to, notching tends to fade into the background more. Neither one is better in the abstract: they’re two different tools, and the only real way to know which suits you is to try both with your own tone.
Why Both Start From Your Sound Profile
Here’s the part the two modes genuinely share: both perform better centered on your tone than on a generic average. You can find yours in a couple of minutes with the tinnitus tone matcher, the same A/B comparison guide Tonaleve uses to build your sound profile before generating either mode.
If you want to hear the difference for yourself, you can build your profile and try masking and notching centered on your tone, right from your browser, no install needed, at my.tonaleve.app.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between masking and notching?
- Masking adds a background sound that competes with your attention against whatever you want to push into the background. A notched filter does the opposite: it adds nothing, it cuts a narrow band out of the sound right around your tone. One adds, the other subtracts.
- Masking vs notching: which one is better for tinnitus?
- There's no single answer: it depends on what's more comfortable for you to listen to and how long you'll have it running in the background. Many people try both with their own tone and stick with whichever one gets the same effect at a lower volume.
- Do both need my tone to work?
- Yes, for different reasons. Notching without your tone cuts a random spot in the spectrum that may have nothing to do with what you hear. Masking works without your tone too, but it performs better — at lower volume — when the background is centered near it.
- Can I combine masking and notching in the same session?
- Yes, they're independent modes, and some apps — Tonaleve included — let you listen to each one separately so you can compare. Neither replaces the other: they're two different ways of working with the same background sound.
- Does a notched filter change how music or ambient sound sounds?
- Not much. Since it only cuts a narrow band, the rest of the spectrum stays intact and the sound is still easily recognizable; the change is more noticeable in the mid frequencies, where the voice lives, than at the extremes.
Keep reading
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Tinnitus and Anxiety: Why Stress Makes the Ringing Louder
During tense weeks or after a few short nights, the ringing seems louder even though nothing changed. Here's why that happens, what to do with your sound environment, and when to see someone.
That Ringing Only You Can Hear Has a Name: Tinnitus
If you hear a ringing, a hiss or a buzz that nobody else does, you're not making it up and you're not losing your mind. It's called tinnitus, it's very common, and there are concrete things you can do.
