Effects of reproduction methods and high-efficiency audio coding on word intelligibility were examined in a tele-collaboration system. Monaural, stereophonic, and binaural methods were studied. Transform domain weighted interleave vector quantization (TwinVQ) [Iwakami et al., Proc. ICASSP’95, pp. 937–940 (1995)] was used as the audio coding method. Intelligibility tests using word lists, in which word familiarity was controlled, were conducted under six conditions combining three reproduction methods with two conditions, i.e., with or without audio coding. In the experiments, three talkers pronounced different words simultaneously; a listener was then asked to selectively hear the word of a designated talker. Analyses of variance of the experimental results showed that intelligibility for the binaural method was higher than for the other two reproduction methods in both conditions with or without audio coding. Moreover, the benefit of the binaural method was demonstrated because intelligibility for the method with audio coding was higher than that for the stereophonic method without coding, whereas the amount of audio data in the former method was much smaller than in the latter, indicating that the binaural method with high-efficiency audio coding is useful for a tele-collaboration system. [Work supported by JSPS: KAKENHI (17560336) and RIEC, Tohoku Univ. (H18/A10).]