The simple motor construction and low cost, fault tolerant power electronic drive has made the switched reluctance drive a strong contender for many applications. But the switched reluctance drive does exhibit higher levels of vibration and acoustic noise than that of most competing drives. The main source of vibration in the switched reluctance drive is generated by rapid change of radial force when phase current is extinguished during commutation action. In this paper, a hybrid excitation method is proposed to reduce vibration and acoustic noise of the switched reluctance drive. The hybrid excitation has 2-phase excitation by long dwell angle as well as conventional 1-phase excitation. The vibration and acoustic noise are reduced because the scheme reduces abrupt change of excitation level by distributed and balanced excitation.