Receivers for horizontally encoded LTE based MIMO-OFDM systems are considered in this paper. Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is used as well as precoding. The linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE), successive interference cancellation (SIC) and K-best list sphere detectors (LSD) are compared. The receivers were designed and implemented for 2×2 and 4×4 antenna systems and meet the decoding rate requirement in LTE, i.e, 210 Mb/s in 2×2 and 405 Mb/s in 4×4 antenna systems. The results show that the performance of the receivers is similar in low SNR but the performance difference increases when a higher rank transmission is used. The K-best LSD has the highest performance and complexity. A simpler receiver could be used in the low SNRs to save power and a more complex receiver in the high SNRs when a higher goodput is needed.