A mismatch between the outcomes of ”classical” audiological tests and the perceived benefits of aided hearing impaired patients leads to an interest in more ecologically valid testing methods, better reflecting the patients’ performance in real-world situations. In daily-life, the living room constitutes a highly relevant complex indoor environment. Here, listening and speech communication typically involve different target or interferer sources, such as a TV set and/or talkers located on a chair or sofa in an adjacent room connected with an open door. This study compares such an ecologically more valid condition to standard anechoic conditions by testing speech intelligibility (German matrix sentence test) in two standard spatial configurations with frontal target and either collocated or 90-degree-separated masker (S0N0 and S0N90). Dummy head recordings of a controllable laboratory environment resembling an average German living room with an adjacent kitchen were used. Target and interferer positions were permuted over four different positions, including an acoustically challenging position in the adjacent kitchen room without line of sight to the target. Speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) were measured with normal hearing listeners. The results show that SRTs in complex living room conditions can be as high as for the artificial standard S0N0 condition.