Soundstage and image height, does it exist?

In my 50+ years of playing this "game" I have found that there certainly is height information that is being processed by your brain, albeit a phantom, as is the center channel.

Moreover, to my ears this is very recording dependent, acoustic guitar and singer I prefer not to hear them on the ceiling as that is outside of my live experience.

Large orchestral pieces "should" sound like you're in a proper theater setting.

At about three minutes into Steely Dan Aja there is a police whistle, on my rig it actually sounds like it is outside and across the street.  YMMV.

Regards,

barts

As many of you know the visual center of your brain uses a ton of "CPU cycles" to recreate what we perceive as our own reality.  When you take that processing load off your brain as a matter of course it uses whatever input is left and draws on past visual input to complete the picture.

That is why I mostly listen with the lights off and my eyes closed.  I suspect many of you 'philes do the same thing.  

Regards,

barts

This series of tests does exactly what the OP is looking for. 

Online LEDR™ Sound Test | Listening Environment Diagnostic Recording Test (audiocheck.net)

There are some people who honestly don't, won't and can't hear it. Everyone is physically and emotionally different.  But sometimes these people can't fathom that other people can. And some of those people think that it's their responsibility to tell people it's nonsense. 

@simonmoon I don’t know about the mastering process, but my recent experience with entry level gear may provide some insight. In the last 4 years, I started with KEF Q150 stand mounts on Monoprice Monolith stands. I didn’t know it at the time, but my soundstage and imagining was limited to a line between the tweeters--a 1 dimensional soundstage. I replaced the KEF’s with B&W CM9S2 towers. The line of a soundstage expanded to a wall, which was only 2 dimensional, being height and width. More recently, that wall gained some depth when I upgraded the streamer to the iFi Zen Stream.

Two channel mastering is likely very different from the object placement afforded by the new spacial audio music mastering. But I would argue that there is some way in which soundstage height does exist. I would guess that someone who argues that soundstage height doens’t exist is probably proceeding from a set of definitions from the spacial audio world. Probably just a definitional problem where people are talking past each other.