For small numbers of channels, tone vocoders using low envelope cutoff frequencies are less intelligible than noise vocoders, even though the noise carriers introduce random fluctuations into the crucial envelope information. Here it is shown that using tone carriers with a denser spectrum improves performance considerably over typical tone vocoders, at least equaling, and often surpassing, the performance possible with noise vocoders. In short, the spectral sparseness of tone vocoded sounds for low channel numbers, separate from the degradations introduced by using only a small number of channels, is an important limitation on the intelligibility of tone-vocoded speech.