What on earth are you on about? The article is referring to Variety, which refers to Puck as having broken the story. Are Variety, the renowned trade publication, and Puck, an independent and journalist-owned publication also "tabloid rags"?
A lot of present-day mastering can technically remain loud while sounding a lot less harsh. That's thanks to aesthetic mixing choices and at least in part due to audio processing and tools like plugins from Oeksound (Soothe) and others, which are used on nearly all top-selling music now https://oeksound.com
I find that the likes of Ariana Grande have a lot more air in their music those 00s acts you describe, while still being quite loud. So do my absolute favorite artists Tame Impala, Caroline Polachek and Dua Lipa.
Commercially this probably works out with better headphones and earbuds as a default listening mode, as opposed to things like the 00s earbuds delivered with digital music players and early smartphones.
That first Billy Eilish record would probably not have been a hit if the target audience was getting their first impression of new music in cars driving at highway speeds.
You are very unlikely to hear a difference like this on laptop speakers. Present-day Apple laptop speakers are great feats of engineering for what they are, but they use a bunch of trickery to create the illusion of bass and such. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental
Even with decent headphones, the difference between these samples isn't trivial to spot, unless you have moderately trained ears.
I'm not an audio professional but I have a great interest in this space. My first impression is that the the bass in the second sample stands out a bit more in the mix, perhaps thanks to higher dynamic range. The high range is muted and the mid range in the percussion and such may be more pronounced.
That's not to say you're wrong about audiophiles. A lot of claims made by this subculture are nonsense and especially not applicable to situations where an everyday person seeks some improvement to their audio reproduction.
For example, lossy audio codecs have a bad reputation among certain people, due to old technology. Mp3 is undoubtedly garbage, 90s tech. If I waste a bunch of time on blind tests, I can spot even a 320 kbps mp3 sample with my regular listening headphones. Lower bitrates are a lot more obvious to spot.
However, this problem is gone for almost all people in most listening environments, mine included. This is thanks to the more modern lossy delivery codecs at decent bitrates, as employed by the the premium tiers of the big streaming services, which are Vorbis (Spotify) and AAC (Apple and most others) and Opus (Youtube Music in some circumstances).
Archival and editing copies of audio should obviously be lossless. Generational loss over lossy media are as real with digital re-encodes as with analog tape.
A regular person who wants to improve their listening experience can easily get decent headphones now. However, anyone who wants to invest in a better shared listening experience than a decent portable mono Bluetooth speaker can offer, should probably start by thinking through the the acoustics of the room they want to listen in.
This doesn't have to be fancy, just having shelves with actual books on the walls in the direction looking towards a speaker system does a lot.
Spending more than 200 USD on speakers in a room with blank walls is ridiculous, unless it's a log cabin. Those actually sound great.
Due to how my head is wired, I've discovered that I enjoy gaming a lot more after I switched to console two years ago: all settings are curated (for better and worse). I'm not even sure why I didn't switch earlier.
The only reasons I can think of are fear of the controller and slow load times due to mechanical HDD on last-gen systems.
I don't spend time away from gameplay trying to get optimal setting. I'm just the type of neurotic that I will do that stuff even though I absolutely don't enjoy it.
I can jump directly into gaming without anxiety over how my hardware is falling behind. With my PS5 being in my living room, gaming is also time away from my desk, which I, much like doing anything on a Windows PC, associate with my IT jobby job.
A console is an appliance. It's like a toaster or dishwasher, except it lets me play games without any work.
With PS5, I also don't have to worry about weird glitches with audio through HDMI in my living room setup, since that's how I prefer to play. And PS5 now also renders Dolby Atmos, without any glitches.
These are of course all me-problems, but I thought I'd mention it here, since gaming is too much fun to be confined to the tuning-happy garage mindset of PC.
Long-term vise I think this is a dubious solution to "set up and forget", or advise people with few resources or limited Linux skills to use.
Mail in a Box makes it seem passably easy to someone with basic skills to get everything up and running, but then don't support in-place upgrades of the underlying operating system. This might be fine, but I really hope people realize what they're getting themselves into. https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/mail-in-a-box-version-v...
This critique is somewhat shallow, if the backup/restore option is easy enough. But I just have a hunch there's going to be a lot of non-upgraded boxes running fullstack-EOL everything.
Of course, a system that does in-place upgrades and then fails is going to leave no-one any happier either.
I guess that my point really is that appliances requiring "complicated" upgrades by moving to a new OS install aren't all that mature. But I acknowledge I have a hard time determining who this product really is for.
https://variety.com/2026/film/global/luca-guadagnino-sam-alt...
https://puck.news/amazon-is-dumping-its-sam-altman-movie/