Soundstage and image height, does it exist?

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. 

In my fully acoustically treated house of stereo with 9 ft ceiling, I have used 40" tall towers and 69" ones. Both pairs projected imaging all the way to the top of the wall. So, in my case, yes. 

I cannot give a technical explanation, but I definitely have experienced a soundstage.  My listening room is untreated, but filled with soft furniture, carpet and drapes.  I stream music using McIntosh solid state electronics and Klipsch La Scala speakers.  It is not the same with all recordings.  Some of the best have been old recordings from the 1950's as well as newly issued material.  At its best, the music comes from each side, above and behind me, and the speakers "disappear."  I have even experienced a soundstage with headphones.  I recall a Tony Scott recording where the clarinet clearly "appeared" from across the room.  I speculate that it involves the quality of the recording and the interplay between my ears and brain.  The soundstage also expands after listening for a while, which reinforces my speculation that the brain becomes acclimated to the sound, and then produces the soundstage.  

As has been noted already, everyone knows that their speakers, no matter the design, can project an image in the center, where there is no driver. Obviously, speakers radiate sound: to the left, the right, above and below. Why would this not create an image above, just as it does to the left and right, assuming the ceiling is high enough to allow for it?

If you want to test this dimension of the stereo image, acquire Northwestern's LEDR recording. It's available free online, but is also on one of the Chesky jazz samplers. Here's a link to a Stereophile review of it: 

https://www.stereophile.com/features/772/index.html

Finally, riley84 asks why anyone would be interested in anyone else's "opinion" in such matters, and was accused of "arrogance" as a result. This doesn't look arrogant to me; quite the contrary, in fact: live and let live. But I still find riley's question naive. OF COURSE we care about others' opinions regarding audio; that's what this forum exists to disseminate! More: I expect those opinions to be backed up by either evidence or argument. I visit this forum for tips on how to improve my system. I'll try those tips which are defended convincingly. Same is true in just about anything else ("life partners," "friends"...). We live among others, some of whom seem to us to be on the right track, others not so much. For me, I'm open-minded, but I want reasons to believe.

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