Sound stage

Its best to think of all recordings as having a soundstage. TWo channel recordings are considered stereo. The soundstage is artificial based on how the recording was miked and mastered but exists nonetheless. Some specialized or rare recordings use a simple two mike recording approach and attempt to reproduce teh soundstage at the live event. These are worth finding and seeking out. The old Mercury Living Presence and newer Dorian and Mapleshade labels are three with many recordings that contain a very natural soundstage due to production techniques.

Unless listening on headphones or on a stereo hifi not set up to address soundstage at all as a result of speaker placement, all recordings have a soundstage in that the "sonic cues" produced live are in the recording and affect teh results in terms of soundstage and imaging. Even with mono recordings, though again these will tend to have everything more dead center and sonic queues captured in the better ones can still provide a sense of 3-d ambience. You have to have a hifi that delivers enough detail to capture all the subtle sonic queues accurately and have things set up properly as well in all cases.

Voices can come from anywhere not just dead center in a stereo recording. Same as anything else except with voices you might find a lead vocal dead center more often. Its all in how the recording was made and anything goes. Listen for where things are not where you think they SHOULD be. If you can tell in most cases where things are, you are in good shape. The biggest best soundstage will not be contained between the speakers but rather have breadth wall to wall and depth as well. Amount will vary by recording. Mono recordings will tend to be more dead center but if soundstage and recording is good will still have some room filling ambience but with a strong bias towards the center of the stage.

back when stereo first hit, soundstage and imaging was a big selling point. You can find old lp releases on Mercury Living Presence and others that go into great detail in teh cover notes how the recordings were made and what was located where during the recording session.

Soon after the novelty wore off and most people did not pay attention to such details. Except us audiophiles, of course.