Compressive Hear-through in Personal Acoustic Devices

The technology described in this document can be embodied in a method that includes receiving an input signal representing audio captured by a microphone of an active noise reduction (ANR) headphone, processing, by one or more processing devices, a portion of the input signal to determine a noise level in the input signal, and determining that the noise level satisfies a threshold condition. The method also includes, in response to determining that the noise level satisfies the threshold condition, generating an output signal in which ANR processing on the input signal is controlled in accordance with a target loudness level of the output signal, and driving an acoustic transducer of the ANR headphone using the output signal.