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Recent studies on animal models have shown that noise exposure that does not lead to permanent threshold shift (PTS) can cause considerable damage around the synapses between inner hair cells (IHCs) and type‐I afferent auditory nerve fibers (ANFs). Disruption of these synapses not only disables the innervated ANFs but also results in the slow degeneration of spiral ganglion neurons if the synapses are not reestablished. Such a loss of ANFs should result in signal coding deficits, which are exacerbated by the bias of the damage toward synapses connecting low‐spontaneous‐rate (SR) ANFs, which are known to be vital for signal coding in noisy background. As there is no PTS, these functional deficits cannot be detected using routine audiological evaluations and may be unknown to subjects who have them. Such functional deficits in hearing without changes in sensitivity are generally called “noise‐induced …