Soundstage and image height, does it exist?

If you can hear it, and I think most of us can, then it (perception of height) exists. It's not just speakers. Years ago, I had an Apt Holman amplifier and a McIntosh 2105 and I tried them in the same system with the same music. The Apt Holman had a very squat height and the McIntosh much taller comparatively. With speakers I guess it's all about the way the drivers disperse the sound. With electronics, I'll leave that to better minds.

My friends and I have tested this by trying the same gear in different rooms. Our conclusion is that image height is a function of ceiling height and position of the drivers. Canting the speakers fore and aft can change the image height as well. Give it a try. 

the human hearing mechanism encodes height information based on frequency contouring caused by the shape of the ear. there is a tone map in the brain that instantly "translates" certain directional sounds as "higher" or "lower." SOME stereo music recordings contain enough of this information, a FEW of them. i have heard it demonstrated on the LEDR [Listening Environment Diagnostic Recording] on a Chesky test disc, with the synthetic cabasa rising above one speaker and sailing across the ceiling to the other speaker, as well as sailing backwards. 

The brain always fills in information and creates illusions that are not real. Close your eyes and listen to vocals, they invariably appear to be dead centre, but there is no speaker there, its an illusion created in your brain, you hear two separate signals one in each ear, your brain processes that and informs you its from the middle, its not is it. Soundstage is the same, some systems give much wider soundstage, more often how they placed is more important. 

of course it exists...WHY its there? the differences among sound at the source, often 2 lil boxes, how it fills our room and our ears...theres a ot going on there. our brains make sense of it. there must be a whole slew of factors at play. the size and dimension of soundstage is quite different from system to system in my house, and tweaking each system changes it. my desktop system has a wild freakin 3D soundstage thats really high...well, when i lower my speakers, the sound stage height lowers. when i flip em upside down it changes again. barely change the toe-in and i get pretty significant changes in width and separation, placement of sounds. ive only recently learned of this holographic experience, and man its wild. but of course its real. you have sound coming at you in a particular manner from a particular place and places. 

we perceive sound as 3 dimensionally with our ears as we do the world around us with our eyes. 

cool stuff. im fascinated.