Blackness - how quiet does it need to be?

I don't think Steve Hoffman was referring to the tape hiss from the original recording. That could be somewhat masked, but not entirely eliminated. What he referred to was the difficulty of taking an original master and getting it sound right on modern equipment.

Here is his view:http://www.tapeop.com/articles/85/steve-hoffman/.

I guess the only alternative is to try the DCC CD version that he made of the Miles Davis 'Kind of Blue' CD.

All the best,
Nonoise

Many recordings were made with pre-emphasis to greatly reduce tape noise in playback. CDP or DAC has processor for it (de-emphasis) and every CD has bit switching it on or off in CDP or DAC. Today almost all recordings are digital and pre-emphasis is never used. Because of that many CDPs or DACs don't even have de-emphasis. None of Lavry DACs, for instance, has de-empasis but my Benchmark DAC1 does. If your CDP or DAC doesn't have de-emphasis and you listen to one of few recordings with pre-emphasis it will sound noisy. I'm not sure if tapes were recorded with pre-empasis (10db increase between 3kHz-10kHz) before invention of CD. Some people tested rippers and found that EAC does not correct for pre-emphasis (leaves recording intact) while Itunes does apply correction. Also some MP3 compressors like for instance LAME have de-emphasis option.

It sounds like we are victims of the times. Not everything is keeping apace and older formatted music is not sounding right, all the time, on modern equipment.

I like Hoffman's story about trying to figure out how to get Hotel California to sound right and it took getting similar vintage JBL speakers to hear how the original engineer mastered it to understand why it was so bass heavy on modern speakers. He had to work backwards with that understanding to do it.

One needs an extensive historical understanding of recording, techniques, playback, equipment and what have you to bridge that gap of old and new in order to preserve the old and enjoy it anew.

All the best,
Nonoise

great thread guys!. something i've often wondered about myself but never asked about. a very interesting read!

I read the Steve Hoffman piece, and my takeaway is as follows (but I'm still not sure this has anything to do with the 'noise floor' of a playback system):
1. given the original limits of record cutting and playback equipment at the time, stuff was heavily EQ'd and dynamics were often constricted, essentially 'gain riding' to bring up the level of the soft passages to overcome inherent noise in vinyl playback.
2. trying to remaster these older recordings on more modern, wider bandwidth equipment, including using differeent playback equipment than a circa mid-70's JBL monitors, means that some of the fiddling originally done with the tapes, described above, has to be 'undone.'
A.If I have that right, I'm still not sure what that has to do with the noise floor of the system- perhaps you are saying that these older recordings are going to sound noisier on a modern system, whether or not remastered. I certainly hear that on old RCA records, which had notoriously noisy surfaces (but gloriously natural sound in many cases).
B. If remastered, there is a danger that the life of the recording can be lost. I have found this- and i don't think i'm alone, in the case of a number of 'remasters'- the other day, i listened to a recent remaster of Janis Ian's 'Between the Lines,' it sounded sterile, lifeless. I pulled out a 1975 pressing that i bought recently, sealed, and the magic was there. Same experience with other audiophile warhorses, like Tea. The old UK pressings are far more natural sounding to me than the reissues or remasters, including the old, expensive UHQR.
C. Granted, I'm listening to vinyl only and don't have the technical expertise to address what happens in a digital processing environment, so I'm not extending my comments to that.
D. But having said all of the above, how does this relate to the noise floor of the system itself?