The perceptual consequences of cochlear synaptopathy are presently not well understood as a direct quantification of synaptopathy is not possible in humans. To study its role for human hearing, recent studies have instead correlated changes in basic suprathreshold psychoacoustic tasks with individual differences in subcortical EEG responses, as a proxy measure for synaptopathy. It is not clear whether the reported missing relationships between the psychoacoustic quantities and the EEG are due to the adopted methods, or to a minor role of synaptopathy for sound perception. We address this topic by studying the theoretical relationship between subcortical EEG and psychoacoustic methods for different sensorineural hearing deficits. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by S. Hirzel Verlag · EAA. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).