The system provides a technique for suppressing or eliminating tonal noise in and input signal. The system operates on the input signal at a plurality of frequency bins and uses information generated at a prior bin to assist in calculating values at subsequent bins. The system first identifies peaks in a signal and then determines if the peaks are from tonal effects. This can be done by comparing the estimated background noise of a current bin to the smoothed background noise of the same bin. The smoothed background noise can be calculated using an asymmetric IIR filter. When the ratio of the current background noise estimate to the currently calculated smoothed background noise is far greater than 1, tonal noise is assumed. When tonal noise is found, a number of suppression techniques can be applied to reduce the tonal noise, including gain suppression with fixed floor factor, an adaptive floor factor gain suppression technique, and a random phase technique.