In many areas of speech signal processing such as automatic speech recognition and packet based voice communication technique, VAD (voice activity detection) plays an important role in the performance of the overall system. In this paper, we present a new feature parameter for VAD which is the product of energy of the signal and the difference of two types of entropies. For this end, we first define a Mel filter-bank based entropy and calculate its difference from the conventional entropy in frequency domain. The difference is then multiplied by the spectral energy of the signal to yield the final feature parameter which we call PEED (product of energy and entropy difference). Through experiments. we could verify that the proposed VAD parameter is more efficient than the conventional spectral entropy based parameter in various SNRs and noisy environments.