If the background is too black I hear less ambient information and sense of liveness that is on the recording. I think of this quality as distinct from low noise. The former can hide information, the latter can expose it. I find that I hear something similar in terms of blackness and void from other products that accentuate contrast by not revealing very low level information.
It's probably as simple as detail retrieval or lack thereof. I think it tends to correlate well with what you called damping. That is, one of the hallmarks of a high resolution system (or not) is the ability to reproduce decays. If it does that well, then I expect it to dig deep and reproduce nuance and ambience rather well also.