The development of affordable virtual reality systems has brought a concomitant increase in attention to realistic virtual auditory environments. Recent studies have demonstrated that a well-designed acoustical rendering allows for perceptual plausibility. For this, a perfect physical reproduction of the sound signal may not be necessary. Instead, higher cognitive factors appear to play a determining role in the auditory illusion. To what detail the human brain detects differences in the physical nature of sounds and how they alter the perception is still unclear.We combined sparse multiband functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and psychophysical experiments to decode auditory rooms from brain activity signals. To achieve a high level of realism, we recorded the acoustics of the actual MRI room by building an MRI compatible head and torso from existing 3D-models. The same sounds were also simulated with the room acoustic simulator RAZR (Wendt et al. 2014). The simulation was designed to match the acoustical properties of the recording room by aligning absorption and geometry while neglecting objects inside the room. Listeners performed an auditory distance perception task with headphone auralizations while lying in the MRI. The similarity of brain activity between the recorded real and simulated room were compared.