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People are always asking what's the new tech, but never how's the new tech made?

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And if you look into it, a lot of the parts of the supply chain are um

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ethically dubious. Whether that's due to wasteful manufacturing processes or just

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unfair working conditions, it can be hard to be excited about new tech when

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you know about the downsides. But that's Fairphone's whole mission. They're

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trying to make tech a little bit more equitable. And these are their new

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Fairbuds XL. A couple years ago, we took a look at the first generation of these.

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also just called Fairbuds XL, which is a weird name, but I guess if you can call

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them AirPods Max, then you can call these Fairbuds XL. The front of the box

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says Fairphone. The side of the box says Fairbuds XL, but they are just

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earphones. I guess Fairphones is too close to Fairphone Phone, so this is the

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best they could do. I liked what they had last time, especially due to the repairability aspects, and they are

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keeping that going with this generation. In fact, if you saw the other one, they

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are pretty much identical in shape. That means that no matter what generation of

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Fairbuds you have, you can use spare parts from the new one or the old one.

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They all work together. Before we get any further, let's take a look in the

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box. You get a nice little egg sack, as Dankpods likes to call them, as well as

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a quick start guide. And the packaging is fully recyclable. I love to see it.

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The darker green color, I think, is a lot nicer than last gen. And while last

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gen did have that kind of cool speckled appearance that you get from a lot of

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recycled plastic, this has gone for a more classy pine green. There are still

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some changes from last gen though. And for the ear cups and headset, they've gone from a polyurethane leather to a

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new meshlike material that they're calling uh bird's eye mesh. I haven't

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looked too many birds right in the eye, but I don't really understand the um

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correlation there. But I do think they just look a lot more premium. And I

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think the texture on the top here looks really quite cool. For the material

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change, this isn't my usual first pick, but I'll give you more impressions when

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I try them on. Let's keep looking around the headphone. The headband still feels

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relatively durable, and we still have folding ear cups, which is cool. And I

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also like to point out that these are like USBC cables that are connecting

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here. For earphone adjustment, you don't have a ton of wiggle room. There's a

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little bit of tilt [music] up and down. Not really much by the way of swivel.

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And for the adjuster, it is a smooth adjustment. And oh, that's um not a

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great look. Uh [music] just from me trying to adjust it, I kind of pulled

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the headband off a little bit. And it happens on both sides. It's not exactly

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flattering, but the good news is that if you want to change the band cushion or

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fabric type, you can just slide it off and don't have to replace a whole band.

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So, that's pretty cool, I think. For controls, you get a single button plus a

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joystick that also acts like a button. And for charging, you have USBC. [music]

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You can also listen over the USBC, but it does require the headphones to use

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battery, [music] which is a little bit of a bummer. It's not passive like it would be if it was

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like a 3.5 mm jack. The batteries are

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replaceable. Oops, wrong side. And inside the left ear cup, there is a

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battery, which they claim will provide you 30 hours of battery life on a single

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charge. And it's a lithium ion battery that has a little recycling symbol on

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it. And it's nice and blue. Isn't that a nice blue color? I like that blue. And

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they use standard Phillips0ero screws. But note that there are a few

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different screw lengths that you'll want to keep track of if you're taking these

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[music] apart yourself. Another thing that I like how they even labeled the

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inside of this ear cup to be left. Like it's just that kind of extra like

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accessibility work that they put in to make this not just repairable for

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somebody with experience with electronics. But for the average user,

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it's little things like that that make a huge difference when you're trying to put this thing back together. The one

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that lasts. Keeping on what's inside of the

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headphones, they have new and improved 40 mm drivers, which they claim have

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better tuning and better bass response thanks to stronger magnets. We'll see if

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that's true when we get to our listening impressions, but I'm just going to take their word for now. Well, I've done a

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lot of talking, but I haven't done a lot of listening. So, while I'm doing that,

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description. >> Welcome back. These aren't the most

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comfortable, not going to lie. They're a little firm. The ear cups are quite

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firm. They have a little bit of clamping and also they don't really seal at the

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bottom that well. Also, being not the largest earcuffs, you larger eared

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fellows might have um well, you might have issues. I don't mind the headband,

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but I'm also not very sensitive to the headband and stuff on the top of my head

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in general. The noise cancelling, which is already on, I can tell is improved

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from the last generation. There is a slight bit of white noise that you can

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hear even when the ANC is on. And also like this is not a very loud room, but I

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can tell just from how it's affecting my voice that it's a little bit more of an aggressive profile. When I switch to

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transparency mode, or as they call it in the gentle voice, it just appeared in my

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ear. Ambient sound. There's quite a lot of white noise hiss. It's not as

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convincing of a transparency mode as you might get from the uh premium tiers from

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like Apple or Sony. But the nice thing is that you can also just choose to have

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the noise cancelling off. We've connected it to Android and we'll take a

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quick look at the app. We got the app installed, but it wasn't as smooth of an

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experience as I would hope. A lot of headphones these days, even like cheaper

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ones, are doing that kind of magic pairing that you can get on Android and

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iPhone. That was not the case with these. You had to download the app, manually pair them, but once it finds

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them inside of the app, we have some default sound profiles as well as a

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fiveband equalizer, which is fine. Personally though, I would like to see

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[music] more granularity from the equalizer. Then there's tips color. Oh,

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you can select it so that reflects coming out. You can update the headphone

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firmware through the app. Pretty basic app, not going to lie. Cool. Let's take

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a listen to some tunes. You might notice that I look a little bit different,

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perhaps cuter, hopefully. Uh, don't answer that. But it's because we found

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some really strange behavior within the app, and we decided to go back and

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retest these headphones before we talked about their performance anymore.

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Okay, I don't know what happened. These sound like The

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moment you touch the EQ, it just everything up. I kind of want to update the software. Basically, within the app,

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you have four preset EQs, uh, default,

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bass boost, podcast, and detail clarity, as well as a fiveb equalizer. But the

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thing is that when you leave the equalizer at flat, it turns off these

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settings and makes a different sound profile than what is default. It's very

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strange behavior. And it caused this

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profile, the equalizers set to zero,

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uh, to sound really truly terrible. Quite bad. I It just sound sounds like

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you're like listening to it through like like a piece of foam or something. It's

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like in in the other room. But when we're in the default profile, to my ears, these are serviceable. They

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definitely have kind of a U-shaped sound profile where we're getting a lot of

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extra treble sparkle and a big bump to the bass and subbase, which is a matter

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of preference. I would say that the treble presentation on these is a little

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un I don't know, unrefined. There's some kind of weird peaks. But what was kind

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of a pleasant surprise is that as I was listening to these, I did actually

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notice certain parts of songs that I had not heard before. I'm not going to say

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that that's because these are like super resolving or anything like that. They're

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not that great, but the unique tuning

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allowed me to hear cool new things in songs that I didn't quite notice were

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there. So, that's always fun. The mids end up being scooped out as per usual in

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a U-shaped sound signature to a point that I'd say like it kind of feels

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almost distant sometimes. A lot of the most important parts of the music where

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there's like vocals and the main, you know, the body of your instruments just

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kind of not there. And the bass can be a little bloated at times. But I don't

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think these sound too terrible. Um, also I've been wearing these for a couple of

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days now. The ANC I would I'll still say is pretty good. The comfort isn't ideal.

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I find it's a little bit too much clamping pressure and as we noted earlier, there's not a ton of movement

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for the ear cups and that makes these a little bit uncomfortable and honestly

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they end up a little bit warm around my ears. Your mileage may vary. Comfort is

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very, very subjective. But what isn't subjective is our measurements. Let's

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take a look at those. Here is the frequency response and variation graph

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from Labs. The white highlighted area is what we consider to be good for most

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people. The average listener will enjoy headphones that fall in between the

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white lines. Now, every headphone is going to have some level of variance,

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and that's where the red comes in on this graph. This is our frequency

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response plus the headphone transfer function variation. Basically, we

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measure these headphones across a variety of different measurement rigs,

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and this is the variation in performance between these tests. So, the red area

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represents what you might hear based on your unique biological construction. And

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sometimes headphones are more or less varied. As you can see in the treble

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region weighed at the top, it's a little bit erratic where you have some specific

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spikes that different people might be very sensitive to. As I said that the

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treble was a little bit wonky. That spike that's just above 10 kHz kind of

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sticks out for me, but I don't know if I saw all of that level of wonkiness. And

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if we look at the overall shape of the graph, you can see that it's pretty consistent in the lows and the mids. And

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we also see that kind of bass bloat as the red line goes outside of the white

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area, as well as that mid-range scoop that contributes to that U-shape sound

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signature that I talked about. The treble is obviously a little erratic,

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perhaps could be tamed, but it's not

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truly bad, but I wouldn't call this a

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high performing or analytical headphone, you know? But I think you might have a

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lot of fun if you're a bass head. This second graph shows the difference between the flat EQ and the default EQ

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on this. And you can see that the flat EQ is um well, it's not really flat at

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all. In fact, it's truly awful. The

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pronounced muddy bass hump that's just over 100 Hz is even bigger. And the

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treble is way, way, way pulled down, which makes for a very, very muddy and

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bad experience. It sounds like you're listening to something in a different room almost. It's truly insane that they

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would call that flat. Hopefully, they can figure that out with a software update. For now, I'd say stick to the

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default sound profile. So, that's the sound quality impressions. I know I

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wasn't too positive, but don't let that scare you off. If this is a cause that

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you support, then maybe consider these.

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They are a little bit expensive at €250.

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And considering that that price point has decent competition, you should do

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your research before you pull the trigger on these, especially because a

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lot more headphones are more repairable than you might think. However, Fairphone

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does have a track record and history, [music] and it provides really simple

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upgrades. So, it's more repairable and you're more likely to have parts that

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are going to be around for a lot [music] longer. If you want to see how these

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come apart, check out the ShortCircuit we did on the previous version of these.

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They're basically the exact same structure. You can literally swap the

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drivers in and out. If you want the new drivers, you can put them in the old headphones if you got those, so you

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don't have to buy a whole new set of headphones.

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I think that's pretty cool. Thanks so much for for watching this video. I love

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you.