Among the most pernicious buzzwords encountered in audiophile journalism is blackness. By this is meant a lack of background noise such as buzzing or hissing or really anything. You’d think that would be a non-issue these days, but given the surge of interest in analog electronics, old-timey gremlins have been making a comeback. Audiophiles who are playing records on a turntable have to deal with rumble, extraneous noise picked up by the phono cartridge, various electronic blips and blats in those itty-bitty wires in the tonearm, and the phono amplifier itself, which is obliged to process very faint electronic signals. Then consider the vinyl records themselves, filled with dirt and dust and scratches and gouges and bumps and pressing errors. Its amazing that any music gets through at all.
Blackness isn’t much of a worry with digital audio save perhaps poorly insulated cables or the like introducing some electronic bubbles into the mix. Most modern electronic equipment just doesn’t get fuzzy or hissy. In digital, you can take black as a given.
However, audio gear exists in the world, and the world is analog as all get-out. Sound comes at us from every angle, up and down and sideways. There’s not a lot we can do about environmental disturbances outside our homes save going bonkers on acoustic insulation, and even then some residual sound is likely to be encountered.
But one thing that can be dealt with is unnecessary and spurious electronic noise in one’s immediate vicinity. For my money the single biggest offender is the fan in a computer or external hard drive. Even when a desktop computer has been manufactured by a company that understands the difference between hissy little fans and nice big ones that revolve slowly and graciously, an underlying murmur of sound is unavoidable. There’s no question that Apple has always been on the forefront of making quiet computers, but even they couldn’t banish sound altogether from their hefty cheesegrater-box Mac Pro desktop machines. Those puppies just generate too much heat for passive cooling to suffice. Whirring disc drives can’t keep from making some sound of their own as well; they are mechanical devices, after all, and nothing that moves in physical space can be utterly silent.
Enter the purely electronic SSD drive in the passively-cooled laptop computer. There is a heaven, after all. Once such a computer enters the picture, silence can become golden. The trick is to keep the laptop in a space that doesn’t contain a bunch of other sound generators such as external hard drives, gizmos with their own fans, or other similar impedimenta. If that can be achieved, then the ambient sound levels drop dramatically.
I didn’t think the difference between a big Mac Pro immediately beside my main desk at home and a Mac Book Pro plugged into my big 30” monitor would be all that great in terms of ambient sound, but it is. I hadn’t realized how loud the Mac Pro actually is, although none of the sound is particularly distracting. The case itself contains large, slowly-turning fans with no hissy little buggers whirring away. However, there is a video card with its own miniature fan (some noise) and four disc drives. Thus the box hums. Not in an irritating manner by any means, but it hums.
Its removal from my home office and placement in a small hall closet, where it can live safely and happily as a music and file server, has created a surprising transformation of the acoustic envelope in my office. I can hear my recordings much more clearly without the slight underlying hum. Of course there’s a real world out there replete with all manner of sound. But here inside my little cocoon, everything seems just a little nicer, a little quieter, a little more sane. Or in audiophile-dom lingo, I have achieved a deeper level of blackness.