Multi-stream and multi-band methods can improve the accuracy of speech recognition systems without overly increasing the complexity. However, they cannot be applied blindly. In this paper, we review our experience applying multi-stream and multi-band methods to the Broadcast News corpus. We found that multi-stream systems using different acoustic front-ends provide a significant improvement over single stream systems. However, despite the fact that they have been successful on smaller tasks, we have not yet been able to show any improvement using multi-band methods. We report various insights gained from the experience in applying these methods in a large-vocabulary task.