The speech recognizer in general operates in noisy acoustical environments. Many research works have been done to cope with the acoustical variations. Among them, the multiple-HMM model approach seems to be quite effective compared with the conventional methods. In this paper, we consider a multiple-model approach combined with the model compensation method and investigate the necessary number of the HMM model sets through noisy speech recognition experiments. By using the data-driven Jacobian adaptation for the model compensation, the multiple-model approach with only a few model sets for each noise type could achieve comparable results with the re-training method.