  The availability of realistic simulated corpora is of key importance for the
future progress of distant speech recognition technology. The reliability,
flexibility and low computational cost of a data simulation process may
ultimately allow researchers to train, tune and test different techniques in a
variety of acoustic scenarios, avoiding the laborious effort of directly
recording real data from the targeted environment.
  In the last decade, several simulated corpora have been released to the
research community, including the data-sets distributed in the context of
projects and international challenges, such as CHiME and REVERB. These efforts
were extremely useful to derive baselines and common evaluation frameworks for
comparison purposes. At the same time, in many cases they highlighted the need
of a better coherence between real and simulated conditions.
  In this paper, we examine this issue and we describe our approach to the
generation of realistic corpora in a domestic context. Experimental validation,
conducted in a multi-microphone scenario, shows that a comparable performance
trend can be observed with both real and simulated data across different
recognition frameworks, acoustic models, as well as multi-microphone processing
techniques.
