Noise, noise noise. It's all noise. To the serious audiophile, reducing noise at every point of a stereo system is job #1. Compression artifacts keep us from touching MP3s with a ten foot pole. Digital streams must contain vanishing amounts of jitter. Conversion to analog requires careful filtering. Interconnects should reject RF and EMI, and hold their own in the vicinity of power cables. Power cables shield the system from the outside world. Mechanical isolation disconnects components from vibration noise. Power supply ripple is smoothed out. This audiophile hobby is completely obsessed with noise, and for good reason. When the noise is removed, the music flows and the magic happens. It's the recipe for success with audio, and in this episode of The Hifi Podcast, hosts Darren and Duncan go around the signal chain to discuss many different types of noise.More listener questions are also tackled, as usual, with this week's questions centering around speaker spikes and philosophical arguments for and against separates versus integrated.This week's album recommendation is a real mind bender. An instrumental work from a session and touring legend on the bass guitar goes in serious audiophile directions while remaining fairly genre-ambivalent. It may be hard to nail down, but this record will prove a real challenge for the subs, and a delight for the ears.