For some background, I'm relatively new to the hobby, having just started out last April with a brand new Ace 400. I really like my Ace - I found some wonderful relics and coins, even a few pieces of jewelry, and it's a joy to operate. Toward the tail end of the 2017 MDing season though, I started thinking about an upgrade. While it's a capable machine, the Ace 400 certainly has it's limitations. I wanted something that could hunt deeper, had adjustable ground balance, and wouldn't break the bank too hard.
I watched a lot of videos on the AT Max and a few other machines to help form my final opinion. I delayed making a decision until the new Minelab machine was released, and once that finally happened I ultimately went ahead and made the AT Max purchase last week for a variety of reasons. Plus I got a nice deal from one of the forum sponsors, Big Boy Hobbies!
The Max arrived late last week and the weather and my schedule final cooperated enough for me to get out for a quick hunt yesterday. As excited as I was leaving the house to try my new Max, I came home twice as concerned and disappointed - but I'm hoping it's just my inexperience with the machine and/or detecting in general.
My main concern is the overall quality of the audio. While researching the machine, I noted that many folks in the forums have complained about the tones being rough or harsh, especially compared to the AT Pro. With that in mind, I paid close attention to the AT Max tones while watching youtube videos during my research. The tone quality in the videos I watched (and I watched a lot!) didn't bother me at all - in fact, I liked them! The Ace 400 has a sharp (some might say harsh), quality to the tones as well, accentuated perhaps because it's a belltone machine. What I was hearing in the YouTube videos didn't sound like too much of a change to me from the Ace.
My opinion rapidly changed during my hunt yesterday. Regardless of settings, all of the tones on the AT Max had a loud electrical popping sound associated with them that I don't hear in any of the YouTube videos. It literally sounds like the crackling you would get when plugging an electric guitar into an amplifier that's already been turned on, or a headphone with a bad connector. In fact, the first thing I checked was whether my coil connection was seated properly. I also repeatedly found myself checking to make sure that I didn't accidentally have iron audio on, the popping was so distracting.
I tried every mode, and every setting I could think of to try to eliminate the popping and crackling edge to the tones, but it just seems to be how the audio sounds. I auto ground balanced repeatedly (generally 89-91), I tried various disc settings in all modes, changed the threshold, lowered the sensitivity, you name it - no matter what, I had the overpowering crackling/popping with all tones, even the high tones. I only hunted for about an hour total at two different sites, and I only dug 2 clad dimes, 4 memorial pennies, and 3 pieces of trash (all shallow at 3" or less in depth). But even when I was digging the coins, I wasn't convinced I was digging a good target - the crackling/popping made the coins sound pretty iffy, sometimes almost overpowering the good signal. Next time I'll drag out the Ace before digging for comparison, but I'm certain all of those coins would have been unmistakable targets on the Ace - they were all shallow. Similarly, I walked past a ton of signals that all sounded like trash, but I'll go back with the Ace - I'll be willing to bet some of those "trash" signals are good targets that got their signals marred up by the crackling/popping Max audio. Bottom line, for me, with the crackling/popping edge to each tone, the Max makes everything sound like trash to my ear - is that just my inexperience showing?
Another concern was pinpointing using the pinpoint button on the Max. I'm very adept with using the pinpoint mode on the Ace, but with the Max, I found it very difficult to accurately use. In several cases, the pinpoint button just created a solid tone once it locked on a signal, and never stopped! For example, I got a fairly compact crackly high tone that seemed worth digging. I pushed the pinpoint button with the coil just to the left of the target - no tone yet, as expected. As I moved to the right, toward the target, the solid tone increased and peaked as expected, but then never went away as I continued to move right. Unusual, but not unprecedented. Moving back to the left again, the solid tone continued well past the target and never decreased back down - to me, that is odd. It also wasn't necessarily repeatable. The next try I managed to get a decent pinpoint. Curious, I tried a third time - and got a similar solid tone situation to the first attempt. I dug anyway, and found the coin. This strange pinpointing situation happened 5 times total. Twice I dug anyway, and found a coin. Once I dug and couldn't find anything. The fourth and fifth times I was getting frustrated and just left the potential target without attempting to dig. I am familiar with other pinpoint methods - with the Ace I was quite adept at the "Garrett wiggle" which works great with the DD coils. However, with the crackling/popping/chatty audio, I couldn't get accurate results with the wiggle method, either.
The moral of the story is, I came home from my first AT Max hunt very concerned that I made a very poor choice for me. Does this description match the experience that others have with the AT Max? Or might there be something wrong with the unit? I know there are a lot of guys who like the Max audio a lot (some of whom I've talked to via PM before making the purchase) - and many have said there is a learning curve with this or any new machine, but I really wasn't expecting to be this dissatisfied with the audio.
Sorry for the long post, but I'm open to any advice or suggestions - I'm very much hoping that I just have a lot to learn about a more advanced detector than I'm used to!
