Published studies indicate that musicians outperform non-musicians in a variety of non-musical auditory tasks, a phenomenon known as the “musicians’ hearing advantage effect.” One widely reported benefit is enhanced speech-in-noise (SIN) recognition. It was observed that musicians’ speech-in-noise (SIN) recognition thresholds (SRTs) are lower than those of non-musicians, though findings—mainly from English-language studies—are mixed; some confirm these advantage, while others do not. This study extends SRT measurements to Polish, a language with distinct phonetic characteristics. Participants completed a Polish speech intelligibility test, reconstructing sentences masked by multitalker babble noise by selecting words from a list displayed on a computer screen. Speech levels remained constant while masking noise was adjusted adaptively: increasing after each correct response and decreasing after each error. Three groups were tested: musicians, musically trained audio engineers, and non-musicians. Results showed that musicians and audio engineers had SRTs 2 and 2.7 dB lower than non-musicians, respectively. Although audio engineers exhibited slightly lower SRTs than musicians, the difference was minimal, with statistical significance just above the conventional 5% threshold. Thus, under these conditions, no clear advantage of audio engineers over musicians in SIN performance was observed.
