Golden Mask 4WD Pro Audio

Audio Clarity

I wanted to write a short blog focusing just on the audio of the Golden Mask 4WD Pro and what I'm going to explain will pretty much cover all their "Dual Tone" analog machines. One comfortable advantage to using a digital detector is the versatility of the audio options, you can pretty much customise them any way that you want to. You can assign specific tones and volumes which in turn makes the hunting experience a little more refined. Unlike the the Deeptech Vista X where you can control the iron volume, on the Golden Mask you don't have that option. Both the non-ferrous and ferrous tones are fixed, you can change the pitch of the 'nonferrous' tone but you can't change the volume. I personally don't find this a problem but those coming from a digital detector over to the Golden Mask, initially, might find it a little weird. 

Once you've used the machine a couple of times you do get use to it, one point to also take into consideration is how you have both the audio of the machine and the audio level of the headphones. If you don't have this set up correctly the audio can sound a little distorted. I've found the best way is to have the headphones up full volume and then have the volume on the machine set lower. This means the low tones are nice and clear, like I've mentioned before, it just takes a little bit of getting use to but once your ears are tuned in, using the machine is just awesome fun. But like all analog machines, if you're not willing to learn the audio then you're going to be wasting your time.

The beauty of the Golden Mask audio is how punchy and nuanced it is, in single tone/disc mode you can easily tell when you're swinging over large iron because you'll hear a clipping/stutter. You might get a one way hit that's nice but when you turn on the target the stutter will appear, so even with a single tone, after some use you're able to understand larger ferrous targets that might be just breaking through the discrimination compared to good non-ferrous signals. When the disc is set to 2 and above most iron targets won't produce a tone at all. Down on the river because there's so much iron I very rarely have the luxury of rotating 360 on a target because there's nearly always ferrous junk either over the top or in close proximity to non ferrous targets. But I find, even partially masked targets have a clarity to them compared to false signals off of large iron.

In disc/single tone mode you'll experience a much quieter hunt, most of the iron will sound like tiny clips and crackles and breaking through this will be the odd false signal "depending on the size of the iron" you're swinging over, all good nonferrous signals will be very obvious once your ear is tuned in. You must remember that I'm writing this from the perspective of using it on the foreshore where the iron contamination is ridiculous.

Using multi-tone obviously gives you more information, you get a low tone for ferrous and a high tone for nonferrous. This can help with hearing potential masked targets or targets very close to ferrous items, it can also help identify targets that could be both a mix of ferrous and nonferrous materials and/or items that have slight erosion on them. Sometimes I hunt in disc mode and switch to multi tone to check a signal, other times I just stay in multi tone so I can hear the good targets jump out.

So to conclude this short blog, I find the audio of the Golden Mask to be brilliant and punchy, you just don't have the versatility that you do on a digital machine to help make it more pleasing to the ear. As pointed out before, after a few hunts, everything starts to feel pretty normal quickly, the Golden Mask is the perfect example of "less is more".