Blackness - how quiet does it need to be?

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.

Whart,

I think I see your point: system noise floor is independent of whatever is playing.
And until something is playing, you can't really judge or appreciate it.

Dense, that I am, I still believe that a system such as yours (and I'd like to think mine) with a very low noise floor will reveal the shortcomings (higher noise floor) of a recording rather than mask it.

I think we are both saying the same thing but in different ways or I'm not quite getting it. Oh well, off to work and have a great day.

All the best,
Nonoise

Blackness has to do with intermodulation distortion. This is a property of all preamps and amplifiers. The lower the IM, the more the unit will be perceived as having a 'black background'. In principle it functions the same way in analog gear as Kijanki described in digital gear.

To lower IM, you have to increase linearity. The supplies have to be quiet, and incapable of modulation due to signal level.

Of course, the equipment should be low noise too :)

Note:

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.

This statement is incorrect. LP mastering is one of the more unlimited audio processes in existence. The LP cutter has dynamic range far in excess of digital or tape and challenges the best microphones. It also has crazy bandwidth which is why CD-4 LPs were able to be made in the 1970s (CD-4 used a 50KHz subcarrier FM-stereo modulated into the grooves).

The limit of the LPs is in the playback. A cutter can make grooves no tone arm or cartridge could ever hope to track and it can do so without a hint of overload. But such grooves might throw a stylus and arm right across the record. All the processing comes in (dynamic limiting and the like) so you don't have to be all that careful to exceed playback limitations. Its just the record labels being lazy.

There is signal and there is noise. Nothing else.

Signal is the good. Noise is the bad.

If more noise leads to better signal, that does not make the noise good. It just means there is a correlation between the two for some reason and the benefits of the signal outweigh the disadvantage of the noise.

If I hear ANY noise in my system, it bothers me. It means something is not right and needs to be fixed. Even noise that you may not hear explicitly is detrimental to what you might be hearing otherwise.

In summary, noise is something that must be dealt with but it is ALWAYS BAD, NEVER GOOD.

Ralph, i was summarizing what was said in that Hoffman article that Nonoise
posted a link to. Perhaps I summarized it inaccurately, to the extent that the
limits placed by the engineers were solely due to playback limitations, not to
limits in what could be cut into the groove in the first place. Here's one relevant
passage: "The one nice thing about LPs is that there's a certain set of rules and
regulations that you have to follow. You can't add a ton of high end and you
can't add a bunch of low thumping bass, because you just can't! Unless Einstein
was all wrong, there's just a certain type of groove that you can cut. And that
groove can only have so much of this and so much of that. In one way, that's a
good thing, because that keeps engineers honest. They can't screw around. On
the other hand, it's a pain in the butt. You want to get as much level as you can
on the record, so the music is louder than the surface noise of the record. So
you want to get it as loud as possible. But in order to preserve dynamics, you
need to make sure that you're not overmodulating anything. In the '50s and '
60s the engineers just reduced the dynamic range by using analog
compression, which is what is on most EQ cutting masters of master tapes. The
ones marked "master" are the ones that they used to actually cut the LPs, the
ones that have been dynamically compromised. So that's how they got away
with it. They kept the levels above the surface noise of the record just by
reducing the dynamics. In order for me to sleep at night, I want to use the
original master tape, which has dynamics. So then what do I do? It's just
compromise."

In another part of the article he discusses how he tried to 'undo' EQ from tapes
that were mixed over older equipment.