According to the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction, disrupted short-term memory can be the result of either attentional capture or interference-by-process. The auditory deviation effect is associated with diversion of attentional resources, which should be largely independent of task demands. In contrast, the changing-state effect is supposed to be due to interference between automatic processing of acoustic changes (during auditory scene analysis) and deliberate serial-order processing. While the deviation effect was found to be associated with individual working memory capacity, short-term memory disruption due to changing-state sound may be related to the efficiency of an auditory filter mechanism. In this study, we test whether the deviation effect is associated with working memory capacity, whereas the changing-state effect is related to auditory filtering. Furthermore, evidence of age differences between the two forms of auditory distraction remains inconclusive. We aim to investigate the relationship between age and both forms of auditory distraction. Therefore, young (18 to 30 years) and older adults (>60 years) were presented with different types of irrelevant speech while remembering the serial order of visually presented digits. Both working memory capacity and auditory distractor filtering were measured before the serial recall task. Consistent with previous findings, working memory capacity was correlated negatively with the size of the deviation effect. Participants’ age group moderated the relationship between working memory capacity and the deviation effect. In contrast, auditory distractor filtering was related to the changing-state effect, but age differences did not account for this relationship.