All bets are off, unless you have your speakers set up optimally for your room and your listening position. Once your speaker and listening position are optimized, I think the recording choices made by the recording/mastering engineers is most responsible for "where" the vocals are placed.
I've got recordings that have to vocals in front of the plane of the speakers, in line with the plane of the speakers, and back from the plane of the speakers. However, I don't recall any that have the vocals right up in my face.
I spent quite a bit of time on my speaker placement and the overall sound quality, balance/bias, imaging, soundstage, etc., improved pretty dramatically from the effort.