Should a stereo soundstage be 3D or 2D?

+1 what @gregm said.

With the right speakers, room acoustics, components, and let’s NOT forget cables - a good recording will immerse you in the performance and the size of the venue and its related acoustics will will become very apparent.

I have a recording of a single Harmonica being played in a church, with pipe organ in the back ground. The resulting sound "transports you" to the venue complete with reverberations and echoes off the walls and ceilings - it is very 3D.

The venue acoustics start to become even more apparent with higher resolving cables - i.e. IC’s, Speaker and power cables.

Most components and many speakers today have the capability of reproducing those subtle acoustics, but very often it is the cables that are not capable of allowing the extremely delicate signals associated with venue acoustics to be adequately transferred between components and speakers.

Also, much of the "dimension" of a recording can be lost due to noise in the various cables - which impacts the component’s ability to faithfully reproduce L/R channels as recorded, impacting image and therefore the sense of "space"

YES - I am a cable believer :-)

Hope that helps - Steve

I'm not sure if stereophonic reproduction was ever conceived or designed to provide height cues, but well-set-up, good systems can give some, albeit not as pinpoint or extreme as breadth and depth.  Some speakers are reputed to "do" height better than others; I've had a hard time hearing that.  Find a recording of a flamenco dancer stamping her feet (zapateo) and clicking the castanets high over her head, and report back!!

@twoleftears - I think you are correct, in that the first two channel recordings were by comparison to later recordings simply using the two channels to achieve instrument placement in a single dimension across the image. Then sound engineers discovered instruments could be "located’ in two dimensions, i.e. front to back also.

then some artists, using a technique called phasing, are able to fool us into thinking the sound is behind us.

However, based on my own observations, it would appear that recording two channels very accurately captures the venue acoustics, i.e. those little reverberations and echoes off the ceilings and walls, which seems to "fool" our senses into hearing height. Perhaps height is not the right term, maybe it’s more a "sense of space", in particular, a large space..

So if we can reproduce the recorded signal "accurately" we should be able to recreate the recorded image, complete with its sense of space - yes?.

I’ve only recently become aware of this "effect", thanks to the cables I now have in my system. They are DIY and so over the course of their development, I became increasingly aware of how the details of the venue acoustics improved with each version of the cables and how those reverberations and echoes played a role in recreating the image with amazing reality, i.e. sense of space.

With the advancement in recording technology and the also audio equipment, I believe three dimensional sound using two channels is now a reality. You just need the right gear.

I don’t know if any system is capable of achieving your "Flamenco Challenge", mainly because audio enthusiasts spend a lot of time trying to get rid of reflected sound adn perhaps we need to utilize an element of that. But as we learn more about this hobby I can see a day when your challenge will be a achieved.

If you happen to have the name of such a track - I would be interested hear it on my system, which I believe has an innate sense of space.

Regards - Steve

Thank for the helpful responses, everyone. @williewonka , I like your explanation of how the 3D soundstage provides a “sense of space”. That makes more sense than the speakers providing definite vertical separation. 

I have never been to a live performance (orchestra, acoustic etc) where I perceived front to back cues.

I imagine that any front to back cues that may exist in our systems and recordings has more to do how the recording session was mic'd.  But it is my opinion that is not how live music sounds.