In this paper the speech recognition performance obtained when using Distributed Speech Recognition (DSR) architecture is compared to that obtained when the speech is first transcoded using the Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) speech codec at 4.75 and 12.2 kbps. In a likeversus- like comparison, made using the Advanced DSR Front-end and the Aurora reference back-end, the DSR architecture gives substantial gains in speech recognition performance. The evaluations measure the change in Word Error Rate (WER) on the Aurora 2 and Aurora 3 databases with "perfect" endpoints. The performance with AMR 4.75 is 50% worse than DSR on Aurora 2 and 47% worse on Aurora 3. Even with the higher data rate of AMR 12.2, AMR is 17% worse than DSR on Aurora 2 and 20% worse on Aurora 3.