I think Johnnantais nailed it pretty good. I'm also not suprised that earlier audiophile definitions don't address this. It seems to me that the issue of noisefloors in systems is a more recent area of attention: for a long time, the issues were around tonality, range, dynamics, imaging and other attributes of the sound the system was making, as opposed to the background 'noise' that wasn't supposed to be heard. Not so much hum, or rumble, or even the level of ambient 'noise' the system is producing while on, when no program is playing.
Instead, as I think Johnnantais suggests, it is the difference between the music on the one hand, and utter silence on the other- the more of the latter, the more the music is going to emerge from an environment that is uncolored and contrasts starkly with the sound of the instruments. If the system has a 'sound' in place of this silence, there is not as much contrast between the music and the silence- so the small details are obscured; in addition,
the 'sound' of the system will also be present when notes are playing and color the music in the same way. So, to me, a dark background means dead quiet in the silences, and also speaks to the lack of a coloration being imposed on the music itself.
It may be that with quieter sources- CD perhaps, for the lack of surface noise, and improvements in electronics, as well as AC, we are hearing more artifacts of the equipment itself- not just what the equipment is designed to sound like, ie, its obvious colorations that are as much revealed in the silences between notes as the sounds of the notes themselves. The attention paid to this also seems to coincide with all the consideration now given to isolation stands, AC conditioning and the like.