No, Mark, they're not. A microphone was placed in front of the singer's mouth. Another was placed in front of the guitar. Heck, they were probably recorded at different times on different tracks, but regardless, there is no way to pan vertically in a stereo mix to represent the distance between mouth and instrument on a 4-foot singing guitar player seated on a 3-foot stool vs. a six-foot singing guitar player standing on a 4-foot stage. That would be interesting; quadraphonic in a left/right, high/low configuration. But that interesting configuration doesn't exist, so everything you hear in stereo to reproduce the singing and playing of the six foot standing singer/guitar player and the 4 foot seated singer/guitar player is created by conventional microphone placement, stereo mixing and mastering, and the effect the dispersion characteristics of your speakers and the acoustics of your room have on all of the above. If you hear a difference in physical stature between a standing Ray Benson and a seated Dolly Parton who were both recorded with microphones in front of mouths and guitars and mixed and mastered in stereo, you're absolutely right: It is not measurable. Neither is anything else that resides only in your imagination.
Tim
You and Tom missed my point. We have live recordings that attempted to capture the sound of musicians playing instruments in a real space. They for the most part are proportioned size-wise believably. For instance, a trumpet being played is not at the same level as the piano keyboard, the drums and cymbals sound as if they were at the correct height that you would hear if you were sitting in a club and looking at the stage, etc. In other words, instruments are scaled from one to another correctly for the most part. Sound takes place in three dimensions. I know of no measuring device that can tell me if I captured the scale of the instruments correctly. My ears will though and that’s my point.
There are so many things that are recorded that measurements can never tell you and that you will only know by listening and I listed some of them yesterday. Will measurements tell you whether the guitar player is playing a Fender Strat or a Tele? Will measurements tell you that someone is playing a Strad and not a $100.00 student violin? My point is that measurements can tell you certain things about the quality of the recording via frequency response and distortion measurements, but they can’t tell you anything about the size of the venue, the number of players and how they are arranged on the stage, and the type of instruments being played . You have to hear that for yourself and your ears will tell you if the recording is good or not.
And to Tim’s point about vertical height being recorded, check out Best Of Chesky Classics & Jazz & Audiophile Test Disc, Vol.2. Chesky recorded a shaker starting at ground level and steadily raised it up vertically. You can hear the shaker climb straight up. How do you measure that? It’s there to be heard. Ditto for the sound of drums being recorded further and further back from the microphone. Easily heard, but how do you measure that distance via test gear? My point is, we can’t measure everything we hear no matter how many times some people tell you that we can.