Adaptive microphone array systems have achieved widespread use because of their efficiency at enhancing speech signals which are degraded by additional background noise. However, these multichannel systems suffer significant performance degradation in the presence of time differences of arrival (TDOA's) between the received speech signals. Therefore beamsteering or beamforming techniques are applied in order to estimate and compensate the TDOA's. A new method for estimating TDOA's in noisy speech signals is presented which includes a generalized cross-correlator, an improved peak detector, and a plausibility check of the estimated TDOA's. This time delay estimator shows a significant improvement upon time delay estimators proposed in literature.