In a method and circuit for the amplification of input signals of a hearing aid, a compression of the signals picked up by the hearing aid ensues in a AGC circuit dependent on the acquirable signal level. For assuring a dynamics compression, the method and circuit implement a signal analysis for the recognition of the acoustic situation in addition to the acquisition of the signal level of the input signal, and the behavior of the dynamics compression is adaptively varied on the basis of the result of the signal analysis. A fixed input-output characteristic that is usually defined on the basis of stationary signals forms the basis of parameter settings of a dynamics compression has been used in conventional calculations. The resulting time behavior for the compensation of input signals by a hearing aid exhibits an effectively different compression given time-variable, modulated signals, particularly given speech. The result is that the compression parameters are not optimally set for all signals. This result is avoided in the method and circuit described herein.