Black backgrounds and such


So I’ve been reading audio reviews for 25 years but sometimes the descriptions etc used still don’t make sense or I question what they are really trying to say. What is a black background for example?  Is it the silence that exists when my system is off ?  Curious if there is some glossary or explanation or even better an audio recording which would provide examples of one descriptor vs another.  It’s kind of like wine but at least when someone says has notes of blackberry I have a reference point!
esthlos13
Could it possibly be the nothingness between notes? An analogy that comes to mind for me is as a child visiting my grandparents in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma on a 1000 acre ranch, no power and no indoor facilities, if you get my drift, looking up into a perfectly dark sky with the stars sparkling hearing the crickets clicking in another wise dead background.
I think it's both being super quiet, but also letting you hear into the acoustics of the recording. Audibly, it feels as if the wall behind the speakers disappears and you are in a different physical space. 

Kind of related, tape yourself talking in a room, then listen to the recording. Your ear/brain mechanism filters out echoes all the time, to the point you barely perceive them unless they are severe or you are a trained listener. 

Best,

E
I have to say I always had the same question. It's hard to describe. Once you hear it you'll know. The first time I heard a blacker background is when I added a black box to my Octave V70se integrated. It was like clearer vocals and instruments. The next time was when I went from Dynaudio C1 speakers to Raidho D1's. Even more clarity. A side observation was when the music was playing loud I found myself being able to talk and not raise my voice when having a conversation.
I heard it when i upgraded my turntable  - from a Kuzma Reference/Triplanar to the bigger, much heavier Kuzma XL with Airline (lateral tracking) arm. There was less a sense of a turntable spinning-- what i'd call a 'halo' around the sound. Not exactly blacker blacks, but when some source of noise/distortion is suddenly absent, you realize it was there. 
I've always likened it to those Elvis painting on velvet. In the audio sphere
I've used the analogy often for what I hear with a well designed tube amp versus a well designed transistor amp. The tube unit will get notes coming out of a dead quiet. The transistor unit will have something busy in the background. It's like there is some Brownian movement or some quantum creation and dissolution at the molecular level that, in quiet passages, you can feel present. Now I know Brownian movement or quantum activity are on any technical level factually misleading and incorrect, still, there's something happening that does not go away there.


With a black backdrop it goes Midnight in the Graveyard quiet. Elvis on a silk background is not like Elvis on a velvet surface. It's nothing if you haven't noticed it. If you don't zone in on it, it's nothing. Once it becomes a possibility in your awareness it becomes imperative. I can't live with a busy background. In effect, listening for blackness is listening for nothing. Is it an obsession to listen for nothing?

Might be, very well might be, but what is this whole hobby but an obsession?






Thanks for all the responses. So does a small amount of barely audible hiss count against the black background?

im still in search for some glossary that will normalize terms used in reviews. It all reads very poetically but hard to gauge whether certain things are meaningful. 
Blackness is a very good description. Just like on your TV. If you can output true black or improve black level then some low level subtleties will be visible.

It isnt the same as hiss. Hiss can be ok - provided it is just random noise.

I think of blackness as tonal. There are no spurious tones. No IMD. No added timbre from the equipment. We hear spurious tones and they are a distraction that make subtle details harder to hear.

Common forms are jitter, IMD, DAC non-linearities, speaker resonances,speaker driver resonances, power supply hum, and of course stuff in your room that vibrates at characteristic tones - gyprock, furniture, floors,furnace/AC. 


@esthios13- J.G. Holt published a glossary of terms for audio many years ago, I can try to find the link (or someone else can beat me to it), but I don’t remember if he addressed this issue in the glossary.
Hiss may or may not be source related. I use all tubes and play a lot of old records and seldom hear hiss. Some record surfaces are noisier than others though.
N.B. Unbeknownst to me, Holt and/or Stereophile converted his glossary into a book that is for sale. So, I’m not going to look for a link, given that you could buy the book if it is still in print and I’m reluctant to engage in copyright infringement.
It appears that the original book is out of print and crazy money. What appears to be an abbreviated glossary was published online by Stereophile: [url]https://www.stereophile.com/content/sounds-audio-glossary-glossary[/url]
esthlos13,
To me, hiss, hum, buzz, anything that detracts during quiet passages destroys a black backdrop. What i was mentioning is that for an amplifier that really is well designed, tube units seem to have less in the background during quiet passages. This is for units that are basically quiet quiet quiet.

If a unit is not quiet to start with, there is no black background. When it's right you get the notes splashed in color across a wide canvas. There's nothing to distract you except noise in the street and perhaps the refrigerator doing what it does. Generally, unless it's quiet in your room already, say that you're listening at night, you won't notice what I'm talking about at all.

If it's dark and quiet though, and there is a diminuendo followed by silence, you want silence. That's the whole idea. At those times, if there's noise of any sort, including a silk instead of a velvet backdrop, you notice.

Those times at night are when you really hear, not when you're blasting the dance music out. Honestly, most of the time it's just not something you even think about.


Tonight, when it's quiet and there is no traffic going by and the cat's asleep,
see if you can feel the system being on or not. Most times, you can.It's great when you have to look at the indicator lights to tell.

That's a black backdrop.

I have that J. Gordon Holt book in a box somewhere, whart. Maybe I should dig it out and put it up for sale!
Hiss produced from the components means you dont have a black background. There's nothing wrong with hiss from an old analogue recording. The fact that you can hear the hiss means your system has a low noise-floor, or black background.

Another example that really shocked me was when Lars K from Ansuz came to my home with a prototype power cable. Up until then power cables mattered but not to what I heard next. Before putting in the cable he pushed the volume to where the speakers popped. Then we replaced the power cable. Note my integrated remembers all settings after a power cycle. When we played the same track and the music sounded much clearer and even more dynamic. Then Lars turned up the volume until the speakers popped again. It didn't get quite twice as loud but very close to that. How could that be I asked after all it's just a power cable. Lars explained the power cable had a new circuit that shifted noise out of the audible band. It's just like the same circuit that the Navy uses to be able to hear a ping from a submarine that could be 100's of miles away. So what that does is let the integrated amplify more music and without noise. It was noise I didn't realize was even there. Ansuz calls it D-TC and have added that to almost all of their cables. Also because of that I heard more layers of resolution with the instruments and vocals.
So this is all very interesting information. The one that caught my eye was from lowrider around hiss. Open to ideas how to, within financial reason, reduce that with the below in mind.
- I have 3 dedicated 20amp circuits which are connected to a box about 20 feet away. Box itself is a 200 amp box and I have a second one next two it. 
- lexicon RX-7 amps each have own circuit, a shunyata defender plugged into the empty, and are using shunyata viper zitron power cables
-marantz 8802a and Oppo bro-105d plugged into Panamax pm-5300. Marantz plugged into Panamax with shunyata viper zitron power cable. Panamax plugged into third 20 amp circuit. 
- balanced interconnects used throughout, audioquest Mackenzie 
-speaker cable is audioquest slip 14/4 with 15 foot runs going through the corner wall for about 6 amp inches. Revel studio 2s are biamped and crossed over at 110hz.