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Edifier 1700s are loving awesome for the money. I have 2750s right next to a pair of Kef LSX or whatever and there is absolutely no contest. The edifiers sound better. the KEFs are on loan from work so I didnt even pay for them and I don't like them. And yeah I got some zero 2s for $30? Ridiculous for the money. I didn't even need them, I just saw the price and figured it's so far below my threshold for a gadget impulse buy they're worth a try to see what the hype is about. With Camilla DSP and the headphone database it's pretty much a non issue anyway, you can make anything have perfectly flat response if you eq it right and that makes it trivial to do so. I've even sat in a treated room with 20k speakers and a 20k turntable and amp setup to hear an album that was "all analog" and it was good, sure, but was it 2000 times better than my edifiers? lol.
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Apr 5, 2025 14:34
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I saw the supposedly $400k+ OJAS system installed at the SF MoMA as part of the "Art of Sound" exhibit last year, it was extremely mid. I even moved around the room waiting for it to sound better than I've heard in the demo room at my local hifi shop and it never did. If you want pretense poisoning here's a very long interview with Devin Turnbull.
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Apr 5, 2025 15:57
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qirex posted:It was good for 20 years before they decided to very publicly step on their own dicks in order to launch some headphones nobody wants. They were an outlier in the tech industry, a company that makes good reliable hardware and usable software. Of course this led to them not being a $100B company or whatever so steps had to be taken to enshittfy. There were definite warning signs like the s1/s2 transition but I don't think anyone thought they would literally break the act of playing music for most of their customers with no warning. But headphones nobody wanted must be shipped. I was kinda optimistic that Sonos would be the first company to make wireless ANC headphones that are actually good, given that they've shown competence with their speakers. The Ace was not good Hellequin posted:Yeah the only reason I can really see myself really upgrading is if I bought a pair of Yamaha HS5 or HS7 monitors or a pair of Yorkville YSM5s like my sister has (they're good). I'm not going to do that though, these Edifier 1700s are fantastic as far as I'm concerned. I do not give a poo poo that they're a "budget" brand. They're fine. I wouldn't bother with Yamaha monitors anymore. JBL and Kali beat Yamaha at the lower-end of the price spectrum, and then you have Genelec and Neumann at the higher-end
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Apr 5, 2025 16:14
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Hellequin posted:Also it's kinda funny that a lot of the snake oil bullshit with the expensive stuff is now largely confined to speakers, because when you look over into IEM land, everyone is raving about something like the 7hz Zero2 which cost like $25. The Chi-fi brands and people like Crinacle really popped a bubble there. I remember back in 2009 when I was looking at IEMs for the first time there was a lot of "you need to spend at least $500 to have even a chance at a decent experience" type stuff. Conspicuous consumption will always find the path of least resistance to self-justification. When the thing to do was drop $500-$2k on one set of golden earbuds people found ways to justify that rarefied buy. Now that the thing is to collect eleventy billion limited run anime waifu tchotchkes at $50/pop those same luxury chasing tendencies turn people into the Collector Scum of that seminal Rollins blogpost. Godzilla07 posted:I was kinda optimistic that Sonos would be the first company to make wireless ANC headphones that are actually good, given that they've shown competence with their speakers. The Ace was not good Low tier ADAM beats JBL and Kali for a smidge more IMO, and they get close to Genelec and Neumann at the high end
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Apr 5, 2025 16:30
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trilobite terror posted:Now that the thing is to collect eleventy billion limited run anime waifu tchotchkes at $50 I really don't understand why almost every pair of chi-fi IEMs needs its packaging plastered with loli waifus. I bought my girlfriend a pair of Zero2s when her headphones broke and was apologetically explaining "no they're actually really good, ignore the weeabo pervert poo poo". I have a pair of 7hz Sonus IEMs (they're fantastic, I absolutely love them) and I was so relieved when the packaging wound up being muted.
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Apr 5, 2025 17:05
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Godzilla07 posted:I was kinda optimistic that Sonos would be the first company to make wireless ANC headphones that are actually good, given that they've shown competence with their speakers. The Ace was not good
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Apr 5, 2025 17:14
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Hellequin posted:I really don't understand why almost every pair of chi-fi IEMs needs its packaging plastered with loli waifus. I bought my girlfriend a pair of Zero2s when her headphones broke and was apologetically explaining "no they're actually really good, ignore the weeabo pervert poo poo". I have a pair of 7hz Sonus IEMs (they're fantastic, I absolutely love them) and I was so relieved when the packaging wound up being muted. I remember Crinacle at one point said the overlap between IEM nerds and weebs is pretty heavy and when Moondrop is still one of the biggest companies in the space it's hard to say it doesn't sell.
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Apr 5, 2025 17:19
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Hellequin posted:I really don't understand why almost every pair of chi-fi IEMs needs its packaging plastered with loli waifus. I bought my girlfriend a pair of Zero2s when her headphones broke and was apologetically explaining "no they're actually really good, ignore the weeabo pervert poo poo". I have a pair of 7hz Sonus IEMs (they're fantastic, I absolutely love them) and I was so relieved when the packaging wound up being muted. because Zeos
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Apr 5, 2025 17:20
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njsykora posted:I remember Crinacle at one point said the overlap between IEM nerds and weebs is pretty heavy and when Moondrop is still one of the biggest companies in the space it's hard to say it doesn't sell. I recommended some earbuds for my old boss and her review was “they sound great, good price, very very weird packaging. I like the pleasant anime girl saying when the power goes on, but I’m not sure why they don’t just beep. AirPod beep.” normies will overlook the same anime that’s a selling point to the weebs.
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Apr 6, 2025 00:33
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Laserface posted:Edifier 1700s are loving awesome for the money. I have 2750s right next to a pair of Kef LSX or whatever and there is absolutely no contest. The edifiers sound better. the KEFs are on loan from work so I didnt even pay for them and I don't like them. i never even heard any speaker yet that is flat-out better than the 305P in a small room, not even $5000 3-way genelecs my colleague who isn't into any audio gear at all with me agrees too when i brought him to test Palladium fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Apr 6, 2025 |
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Apr 6, 2025 02:39
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Low tier ADAM beats JBL and Kali for a smidge more IMO, and they get close to Genelec and Neumann at the high end [/quote] This is anecdotal but for what it's worth, when I went shopping for mid-tier monitors a while back, I compared lower end Adam speakers to JBL LSR308 v1's and much preferred the JBL's. The Adams sounded really good and I guess "accurate" but the ribbon tweeters did something to the high end that I just wasn't used to, while the JBL's sounded more like just a great, super clear set of home studio speakers, like something you'd normally listen to music through while still being relatively flat, so that's what I went with and I've been pretty happy with them ever since.
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Apr 6, 2025 04:03
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well why not posted:I recommended some earbuds for my old boss and her review was “they sound great, good price, very very weird packaging. I like the pleasant anime girl saying when the power goes on, but I’m not sure why they don’t just beep. AirPod beep.” Jesus Christ I know nothing about these brands and I have no clue how I would react if I turned on some headphones and heard anime. Do they have a version for regular people?
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Apr 6, 2025 17:26
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no
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Apr 12, 2025 09:26
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Wayne Knight posted:Jesus Christ I know nothing about these brands and I have no clue how I would react if I turned on some headphones and heard anime. Do they have a version for regular people? Audiophile Snake Oil and Foolishness Thread: Do they have a version for regular people?
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Apr 15, 2025 21:01
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Sonos leadership getting canned was great but I expect long-term I am destined to own paperweights. They had it figured out — paid for software NRE, a premium position that let them sell simple Class D poo poo at a high price point, a solid “in” with high end home builders and they hosed it all up. Open replacement firmware would be great, but probably a ways out. If I found myself unemployed for a few months, I’d go after it.
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Apr 16, 2025 00:49
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As long as they support airplay and dlna they should go until they die.
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Apr 16, 2025 02:09
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Be smart: buy dumb (devices)
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Apr 16, 2025 03:16
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Plug'n'play (plug in the cables, play music.)
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Apr 17, 2025 20:48
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movax posted:Sonos leadership getting canned was great but I expect long-term I am destined to own paperweights. I've tried to understand from a distance but haven't figured out what it was all about. As in, what did they even gently caress it all up for?
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Apr 17, 2025 20:58
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Why does any tech company ever gently caress with perfectly unbroken things people like?
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Apr 17, 2025 23:22
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Mr. Mercury posted:Why does any tech company ever gently caress with perfectly unbroken things people like? Usually money. Rarely, actual compatibility issues.
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Apr 17, 2025 23:28
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Oh, for sure; mainly just a rhetorical question, but you're correct
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Apr 18, 2025 03:48
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Sonos did it twice. They hosed up by bricking a bunch of existing gear on purpose and offering a 20% discount to replace the bricked products. The second time they rewrote their whole app to support new products and then left out basic common features from the old app from the new one. I will concede the Sonos playbar and Sub are really great sounding for a sound bar, though. Thankfully my dad is too old and stupid to update his apps and ruin his functionality else I'd probably get a lot more support calls.
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Apr 18, 2025 06:19
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BobHoward posted:I've tried to understand from a distance but haven't figured out what it was all about. As in, what did they even gently caress it all up for? they really really wanted to make their own headphones which i think the app didn't support because it was mostly designed to work via wifi, and probably had 10 years plus worth of tech debt piled up
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Apr 18, 2025 16:59
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Mr. Mercury posted:Why does any tech company ever gently caress with perfectly unbroken things people like? Sonos did a few major fuckups very slowly, then they did even bigger fuckups very quickly to try to compensate The root cause of a lot of their issues is basically tech debt. If you're not a professional computer toucher this is when you make a decision for short term benefit knowing that it might create bigger problems later. In Sonos' case this tech debt goes all the way back to their founding 20+ years ago. They developed their platform and the original products [the zoneplayers] and then basically didn't update it significantly for a whole decade. This includes stuff that persists today like when your library gets too big and it starts losing songs. They built a bunch of successful products on top of it including their stuff that went on to be genuinely huge sellers in volume like the Play 1 and Play 3. Changing their platform at such a glacial pace allowed them to get huge economies of scale which led to stuff like the $99 IKEA speakers being viable. In 2015 they realized their codebase and tech stack was getting super long in the tooth and started selling the S2 models, still running the old software. These supported more modern tech but there was a problem in that a lot of people had huge systems with the old hardware that would never be fully compatible. This is when they did the disastrous upgrade program where you'd get 50-70% off a new model if you let your old one be bricked by them. Sonos never turned off any hardware that wasn't specifically requested by the owner. To MBA brains this was a win/win: new sales plus actually removing the old products from the market so those people who refused to upgrade couldn't get even more entrenched in their old hardware. This went... extremely not well and eventually they did a software split where you had to use S1 apps to run old or mixed networks and S2 if you had only new stuff. This whole thing also took like a year and damaged their reputation a lot. That said in the meantime to new customers it was still by far the easiest and most reliable way to do multi-room streaming, plus they're to my knowledge still the streaming hardware company that's always supported the most platforms and services. At one point they had a system that could use Alexa, Siri, Google assistant or their own voice search on demand at the same time. Naturally Apple, Google and Amazon nuked this from orbit. Rumors are this is why they don't support Chromecast even today. They chugged along being successful [especially in soundbars] but were always seen as a niche company and Wall Street never took them seriously because selling stuff at a decent margin is 20th century business. In today's world you ain't poo poo to investors unless you can demonstrate recurring service revenue. They launched a paid radio app that I'm pretty sure nobody ever signed up for, added mandatory account creation and did some other moves that clearly paved the road for "service Sonos." In the mean time they had another old-rear end architecture that supported stuff nobody [except a large portion of their many existing customers] cared about like locally stored music. They undertook a "green field" approach with a new app from scratch. This happens a lot in tech, [and usually fails] but this is when they decided to build an own-dick-stepping-upon machine as part of the process: they tied the launch of their noise canceling headphones [which aren't wifi, despite literally everyone expecting them to be] to the launch of the new app. I doubt there's a genuine technical reason for this, other than they didn't want to put a Bluetooth stack in the old software. Then the CEO gave a drop dead summer date for the launch of the headphones so they'd be widely available for that holiday season. They also decided that instead of launching a separate app for the headphones during the transition they'd upgrade everybody to the new software. This meant the software had to roll out early so people in the press and the like could give them preview coverage. The beta forums at the time were a mess, with people reporting widespread issues with basic functionality. They decided to push out the new app anyway despite it clearly not being ready because they had a press tour set up for the headphones. It was billed to customers as "a new design with better navigation" but didn't mention anything about changing core functionality. What actually happened is a bunch of people lost the ability to play music on their very expensive system overnight. You heard a lot about alarms and playlist editing not working but they also changed the whole SMB system without telling anyone. Previously if you had a Mac or Windows machine as your main server instead of a NAS the Sonos app would attempt to set the shares up for you. They jettisoned this entirely, without telling anybody the details or providing any documentation about it, and basically the support forums and reddit figured this out on their own and posted instructions for people. To this day Sonos does not have official support responses for this. Anyway, the rest is pretty well known: customers rioted, the CEO gave a series of interviews where he called them whiners who were afraid of the future, then he gave a series of interviews where he apologized for doing that and said they were going "all hands on deck" to fix things which meant they had to shelf at least two new products, the headphones landed with a big thud and without the functionality that they needed the app for anyway, the app is very slowly improving but is still miles slower and less responsive than the old one, the CEO and head of product got the boot, and now they appear to be flailing. qirex fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Apr 18, 2025 |
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Apr 18, 2025 18:04
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They put sleep timer back in the app, I'm happy now. What a disaster of a rollout though
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Apr 18, 2025 18:10
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taqueso posted:They put sleep timer back in the app, I'm happy now. What a disaster of a rollout though Yeah lack of alarms and sleep timer ruined like 80% of what I use mine for. For some reason Roon absolutely refuses to do alarms and it’s frustrating because I could drop the Sonos hardware entirely if they did. I’ll probably slap something together in Home Assistant to do it. There is an extension but it requires deep grognard bs I refuse to do.
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Apr 18, 2025 18:53
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Before I got to click the Marketplace link when opening Facebook to browse Marketplace, Facebook showed me a classic source memer
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Apr 18, 2025 23:07
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Placebo is a hell of a drug.
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Apr 19, 2025 01:24
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Mola Mola is a fitting name for the brand, seeing how its animal namesake has such a beleaguered and dim-witted reputation
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Apr 19, 2025 04:28
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”we at Zybourne Audio are thrilled to announce the launch of our twin flagship DACs: Pthirus Gorillae, built around a top-shelf ESS chip surrounded with our fully custom power and ADC architecture, and its twin sister Pthirus Pubis, Zybourne Audio’s latest attempt to make a no-holds-barred fully discrete ladder DAC with a fully custom build from top to bottom. Add one or both to your hifi system today! Starting at $9999.99”
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Apr 19, 2025 04:35
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$40k worth of gadgets to get the most out of a 320kbps bluetooth signal from your phone is genuinely impressive.
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Apr 19, 2025 04:36
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homie looks like he’s listening to “Happy” by Pharrell on repeat
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Apr 19, 2025 04:40
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the Zybourne Audio booth will only have GG Allin and Big Black LPs available for equipment demos
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Apr 19, 2025 04:43
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A recliner would've added more to the experience than any of the audio gear did.
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Apr 19, 2025 06:44
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trilobite terror posted:Mola Mola is a fitting name for the brand, seeing how its animal namesake has such a beleaguered and dim-witted reputation Mola Mola stuff is legit high end, though, that brand is half owned by Bruno Putzeys who designed most of Hypex and Purifi's amps. Yeah it's stupid expensive but at least it actually measures perfectly and isn't snake oil. It's kind of like Benchmark to me, it costs a lot but they don't make stupid promises about it and it probably performs better than the bulk of stuff that's in the same price range.
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Apr 19, 2025 07:27
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qirex posted:Effortpost: thanks! It sounds like they had plenty of opportunities to not repeatedly footgun, but MBA brained management kept inventing new ways to fire bullets into feet and was always convinced that this time it would go great for sure.
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Apr 19, 2025 10:57
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qirex posted:Mola Mola stuff is legit high end, though, that brand is half owned by Bruno Putzeys who designed most of Hypex and Purifi's amps. Yeah it's stupid expensive but at least it actually measures perfectly and isn't snake oil. It's kind of like Benchmark to me, it costs a lot but they don't make stupid promises about it and it probably performs better than the bulk of stuff that's in the same price range. unless you can like breakdown the dev and manufacturing costs for me in a way that makes sense, a $13k DAC is snake oil on principle
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Apr 19, 2025 10:59
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trilobite terror posted:unless you can like breakdown the dev and manufacturing costs for me in a way that makes sense, a $13k DAC is snake oil on principle The CEO's yacht payment is a cost
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Apr 19, 2025 11:51
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Laserface posted:A recliner would've added more to the experience than any of the audio gear did. if i got nearly $40k to blow to listen on a fixed spot im definitely going with something with no bass or soundstage njsykora posted:$40k worth of gadgets to get the most out of a 320kbps bluetooth signal from your phone is genuinely impressive. nah it its casting by streamer, not streaming the audio over BT still doesn't make any loving sense anyway since he could just simply fed the DAC input directly through the phone's USB port. everything is fully digital until the DAC, and he is STILL stuck at that spot right? Palladium fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Apr 20, 2025 |
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Apr 20, 2025 09:09
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