Blackness - how quiet does it need to be?

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?

Whart,
I think your "A. If i have that right..." explains your "D. But having said that...".
You were correct at "A" .
If I understand this.

All the best,
Nonoise

NoNoise, I'm not trying to be contentious. But, I don't think system noise
floor is entirely program material-dependent. If you had a very good
recording (let's stick with vinyl since that's what I'm more familiar with),
quiet pressing, good quality recording, etc., a system with a lower noise
floor is going to reveal more that is on that recording - more music -and all
the descriptors that come with good fidelity- dynamic shadings, tonality, etc.
with less ambient 'gunk' (my scientific term) from the system itself to
obscure what is on the record.
I base this on my experience in using horns with extreme efficiency- where
the sound of the electronics, the AC power, etc. is revealed with
ruthlessness unless the system is very, very quiet. I am raising this not to
advocate a position, or to say that horns or vinyl or whatever is better, but
just to focus specifically on the question of 'noise floor' of the system itself
and how it bears on musicality of home reproduction. And, as mentioned, i
judge it not from how 'noisy' the system is at steady state without a record
playing (although that can be relevant i guess) but how revealing the
system is at low volume with music playing.

BTW, i appreciate your response.