Discrimination 'As Low As You Can Go'

I keep finding myself compelled to write about the levels of discrimination that I personally use because there seems be a great misunderstanding about discrimination as a whole. Those that have come into the hobby via digital machines have a totally different viewpoint on it compared to those that have been in this game for decades. For the most part, those who started on analog detectors seem to get what the 'disc' is all about. You can't run a high disc setting and expect your machine to unmask well, there's always a trade off, for me, I want to run my discrimination as low as possible on the specific terrain that I'm hunting. This will obviously vary from site to site depending on the size of the iron you're dealing with.

What Do I Mean By "As Low As Possible"

I want to find that sweet spot where the audio provides me with just enough information on the iron, this doesn't mean cancelling it out completely. It needs to be set so it gives me just a small buzz or click, enough for me to decipher ferrous from non-ferrous through the audio alone. The advantage to setting it low, it will allow the machine to unmask to its full potential. The disadvantages of this is, your hunt isn't going to be a quiet one and you have to take it slow when investigating signals. These elements make no difference to me because I hunt slowly and take my time with all signal responses.

It goes without saying that if you run you disc as low as possible then your machine might trigger off on some iron, Does That Mean It's Falsing? in my mind it doesn't, you're simply opening the ground up more so you're going to be receiving more messages within each swing. People have been conditioned into thinking that if a detector makes any noise whatsoever when swinging over iron then the machine is unstable and falses, this is a complete load of bollocks to me. This is where Nexus machines can be used to help explain my point of view on this subject, even though what I'm about to explain goes for all my analog machines.

Nexus are great unmaskers but as I've explained before, if you run the disc too high then you're taking that ability away. Setting Nexus up like a digital machine is both a waste of your time and money, you have to master its language when you're running a low disc. This is easily achievable but if you have a mass-produced state of mind then you're not going to grasp this concept. Nexus allows you to disc out a small iron nail, and in doing so, knocking out iron of a considerable larger size. 

On occasions when swinging over large iron,  you might get a high tone coming into play, but as I've explained before, firstly, the low tone always comes in first and secondly, most of the time you can't isolate these high tones. On really large dense iron you might be able to isolate the high tone BUT it's dead obvious that you're swinging over iron. Once you master this language it will allow you to run the disc low which in turn will enable the machine to unmask to its full potential.

A Perfect Tool For The Iron On The River

I've always equated what I've explained above to drums and the way that I tune them, let me break down my point as clearly as possible. Drums, just like metal detectors come in at different price ranges, this has a lot to do with the quality of materials that they're made from. Drum kits can be made of maple, birch, oak etc, the same goes for snare drums, you get copper, bronze, brass, steel, there's loads of options. Cheap drums aren't going to sound the same as expensive drums, the overall quality to both the resonance and the attack will vary depending on shell and skin choice and how you decide to tune them. 

In this day and age with modern production standards, both studio produces and front of house engineers want drums to be as dead and as dull as possible. Pay very close attention to my next point - Here's an instrument that's designed to breathe and resonate being dumbed down and stifled because it basically makes everyone's job a lot easier. It's easier to deal with a dampened drum as opposed to one that resonates. The parallel here is buying a machine that's wide open and pushing the discrimination up so high that it removes the machines peak performance. In regards to drums, there's no point in buying a kit with amazing 9 ply maple shells if you're going to choke the skins and apply dampening to dull down the resonance, you might as well purchase a shit drum set for £50 and the same applies with the snare drum, what's the point in buying a gorgeous Ludwig black beauty if you're going to dampen it to fuck. 

So taking the paragraph above into account, what's the point in buying a metal detector that has the ability to unmask brilliantly if you're going to run the discrimination so high that you take the ability away. This point is relevant for all my detectors, they all give enough clues that you're swinging over iron with the discrimination close to zero. When running both my Legend and Equinox with a low disc setting, clues in the audio just aren't as recognisable because the microprocessors need time to think. Analog is instantaneous, there isn't a delay so the feedback you get within the audio communicates perfectly as to what you're swinging over. I don't believe microprocessors will ever match the speed of an analog circuit but to get the most out of this circuity it's really important you know how to set it up correctly.