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Equinox 900 Coin Hunt High Mineralization


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The opposite side of that argument is an Equinox 800 may leak, a Legend may blow it's speaker, it seems to me a whole lot more Legends blow their speaker than Noxes leak, no detector is immune to faults unfortunately and Nokta could not predict the brand of speaker they were using was rubbish. What made this all that more jarring is how much Nokta attacked the Equinox about its faults.  

I was just reading a guy having a fit on Facebook last night that his 1 month old Legend speaker blew, not sure if it was new old stock or not but he didn't seem to think it was.  Both require a pod replacement/repair so there is little difference to me the reason behind the fault and I'd personally prefer a replacement anyway.  The Legend's fault is more common, far more speakers are blowing than people complaining of leaks.  Some people have had multiple speakers blow, much like some have had multiple Noxes leak.

If I had a Legend and a Nox, both bought at their release I'd be far more concerned about my Legend speaker failing than my Nox drowning, the reason, I don't often water hunt, I run the speaker full time and on loud volume.

Hopefully Nokta have sorted the speaker problem by changing brands, and hopefully Minelab have fixed the leaking with the new design. I'm sure when stock runs out the Nox 600 and 800 will disappear from the market, they may then adjust the price of the 700 and 900 a little down once the initial flurry of buying is over.

It does sound like it's lucky the Nox wasn't marketed and designed as a new diving detector though as if every owner was using them in the water the failure rate would be so much higher.

People shouldn't act like the Nokta is a better quality detector though as it obviously has quite a big issue with the ones in the wild at the moment, speakers will be blowing for years to come as some don't use them all that much.  I'd be trying to make mine blow under warranty if I had one just like I tried to make my Nox drown by leaving it on the bottom of my spa pool for a few days at a time a few times, I failed, I couldn't drown it.

Minelab have no excuse for the coil ears, they were failing on the CTX, they used the same ears on the Nox, what did they expect?  It took them to have a light bulb moment during the design of the Manticore that perhaps they need to fix the ears.

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10 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

I agree. But these are not the 600 and 800 - completely new housing, no matter how similar it looks. The fact the issue existed in the 600 and 800 and were specifically addressed in the 700 and 900 should actually give people confidence, not the other way around. Engineer jobs are on the line with this one. Fail once - oops. Fail twice when you know about an issue the second time around, time to look for another job.

They also tried to build customer confidence with the new models by now having an IP68 rating where as the original Equinox had no rating.  So far so good, I haven't heard of any leaks yet.

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2 hours ago, phrunt said:

they may then adjust the price of the 700 and 900 a little down once the initial flurry of buying is over.

Naw.  They'll probably raise the price like they did with the Nox 800, 3 years after release. :rolleyes:

2 hours ago, phrunt said:

It took them to have a light bulb moment during the design of the Manticore that perhaps they need to fix the ears.

I give them credit for doing something (and now if the ears break, it's a rod replacement not a coil replacement) but why re-engineer and make the solution and lower rod design unique (to Manticore) and more complex to manufacture vs. simply increasing ear thickness across the board...strange.

Also, I wouldn't be too quick to throw stones Nokta's way considering the anecdotal reports of speaker issues cropping up with Manticore.

It's really hard to ascertain failure rates of Nox drownings vs. Legend blown speakers not knowing how many people submerge their detectors vs. run them with the loudspeaker vice headphones.  Also, since the Nox 600/800 leak issue was never really addressed with an actual root cause determination and design/manufacturing fix (unlike the speaker batch issue that Nokta did identify and address), a number of Nox users experienced multiple leak failures after pod replacement.  Which is just inexcusable.  At least I never heard of them not doing a warranty replacement for a leak, so there is that 

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19 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

I give them credit for doing something (and now if the ears break, it's a rod replacement not a coil replacement) but why re-engineer and make the solution and lower rod design unique (to Manticore) and more complex to manufacture vs. simply increasing ear thickness across the board...strange.

They did change the ear design on the Equinox 900/700, right?  Not thicker (AFAIK) but with added angle extensions, effectively stiffening the tabs.  (Pretty sure someone showed a picture of that new configuration here.)

IMO the Manticore's attachment method is superior because if damage occurs it should be less expensive (either for ML if under warranty or for the user if out-of-warranty) to simply replace the lower shaft.  But in order to allow Minelab 800/600 coils to work on the 900/700, that extreme rework isn't compatible.  And for once ML isn't making everyone buy new coils when the old ones will work, at least that's what I've thought I read.

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8 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

They did change the ear design on the Equinox 900/700, right?  Not thicker (AFAIK) but with added angle extensions, effectively stiffening the tabs.  (Pretty sure someone showed a picture of that new configuration here.)

Yep forgot about that. They changed the stock 11" coil ear design to include a threaded insert on one ear.  Don't know about the Xterra coils.  6" and 12x15 coils were not redesigned AFAICT.  Not sure why that was not sufficient for Manticore.

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6 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

Also, I wouldn't be too quick to throw stones Nokta's way considering the anecdotal reports of speaker issues cropping up with Manticore.

It's really hard to ascertain failure rates of Nox drownings vs. Legend blown speakers not knowing how many people submerge their detectors vs. run them with the loudspeaker vice headphones.  Also, since the Nox 600/800 leak issue was never really addressed with an actual root cause determination and design/manufacturing fix (unlike the speaker batch issue that Nokta did identify and address), a number of Nox users experienced multiple leak failures after pod replacement.  Which is just inexcusable.  At least I never heard of them not doing a warranty replacement for a leak, so there is that 

It's not necessarily throwing stones although I am in a bad mood as I was driving along, singing a song with the sunroof open catching some rays when some bird from high altitude decided it was time to drop a bomb, that particular bomb flew down right through my sunroof and hit me in the side of the face! Talk about a good aim.  My payback was to have a lot of chicken for lunch.

I was just pointing out no brand seems immune to these problems cropping up sometimes on new models, it's just the way Nokta was very clearly saying how much better they were than Minelab for quality that sort of backfired on them.  Nokta were the ones gloating they made superior machines when it comes to quality and even in their marketing were pointing out how much better quality they are than the competition then they've had their fair share of issues with the Legend too, so kinda embarrassing for them the way they behaved then issues pop up.    I much prefer XP's marketing method, focus on their product and what's good about it, ignore the competition, highly respect XP and even Gary with his videos for behaving that way.

I almost expect the Manticore to have some hardware fault appear, it would be out of the ordinary if it doesn't 🙂 I'm hoping it doesn't, but problematic detectors are more common than not, for the most part the cheaper built Vanquish hasn't had issues that I've seen, perhaps less people have one or report on problems with it but I've not seen anyone complaining about anything, I've seen some coils with broken ears on the Vanquish but of course they used the same pitiful ears they did on the Ctx and Nox with it so that's to be expected.  I can safely say I much prefer my Simplex ears, one of the few things I like about it.

Minelab was lucky their main Nox fault was with waterproofing as most don't use their machines in the water, and others only sometimes do and many not at all, the hard core water hunters are a smaller subset and the most likely to get the most problems.  The Legend speaker thing is likely to show its face more often as you would expect a larger number of people use the speaker at least sometimes than detect underwater and the Legends peak sales like every detector were when it was first released, it took a while to work out there was a speaker issue and at that point the Legend had been on sale for quite some time. 

It's difficult to know what's caused the Legend speaker problem, I've seen lots of people saying the volume over drives the speaker and if they use lower volume they won't blow the speaker, I just can't imagine Nokta would make that mistake putting a speaker in that can't handle the volume output of the detector, very unlikely, I think it's more likely they were unlucky and ordered speakers that were not very good quality and have a high failure rate.   The Simplex has also been a bit plagued with speaker problems so perhaps the same brand speakers? Quest were smart, their speaker is a little pop out module with one screw that can be easily replaced by the end user, I love that idea.

I must say Nokta react to their faults a lot better though, fixing them up on existing models rather than people having to buy the new model to get them rectified.  It took a lot of pushing and shoving I think for Minelab to acknowledge and then eventually fix the GPX 6000 EMI thing and they left the dodgy ears as they were and still pump out coils with them now.

 

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Steve asked me a question on page 1. I answered it as best I could based on what I know from experience and what I have seen from the Equinox 900, Deus 2 and the Legend.

So far, I am definitely not seeing a staggering or even a significant quantifiable difference in performance between these detectors apart from gold prospecting and available coil choices. Since I don’t dive, the biggest differences for me are versatility, ease of use and price.

I hope XP’s upcoming software update fixes the three issues I have with it: really small target detection, weird target IDs for non-ferrous near iron and pairing/handshake issues with the WS6 as master. 

I hope the Nox 700/900 don’t leak and coil ears don’t break.

I don’t use my speaker on my Legend so I really don’t care if it goes out.

Personally, if I was doing a 3 meter drop test or a 3 meter toss test from what I have seen so far, the Legend would survive both. The other two…..I have my doubts.

I don’t get into to which manufacturer said or did this or that from a marketing standpoint. 

I just go out and detect with these amazing detectors.

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3 hours ago, phrunt said:

 

I was just pointing out no brand seems immune to these problems cropping up sometimes on new models, it's just the way Nokta was very clearly saying how much better they were than Minelab for quality that sort of backfired on them. 

 

Hey Phrunt.

This is an excellent thread and I don't want to get too off topic, but when it comes to build quality, I don't recall Nokta  "very clearly saying how much better they were than Minelab". Do you have a source for that?

BTW: Gary from XP? Top notch!
 

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33 minutes ago, Digalicious said:

This is an excellent thread and I don't want to get too off topic, but when it comes to build quality, I don't recall Nokta  "very clearly saying how much better they were than Minelab". Do you have a source for that?

BTW: Gary from XP? Top notch!
 

It's not something I can be bothered hunting around for and I'm sure if you can be bothered you won't have difficulty finding stuff, and it was generally the "competition", and who is the competition? 🙂  It's not Fisher.

They're currently even eluding to it on their site now, but if you go back and watch many of Dilek's videos on the Legend you may hear some things that will perk your ears about the "competition".

Legend.jpg.5acaef419628b8d68717e4c619bff57d.jpg

I'm going to hold out for the Legend 2 to see if I want one as as Jeff has already pointed out the top tier detectors are so close in performance (aside from prospecting -  thanks Deus 2) it's really up to the end user which they prefer feature wise, brand wise or whatever makes them choose.

The problem is at the moment Nokta are saying on their website there will be no Legend 200 or Legend 300, so they're sticking with the Legend in its current form for quite some time and in it's current form I don't see an advantage to having one, great for Legend owners as it likely means they'll keep doing firmware improvements for them.  I can understand that though, it's got to be extremely hard to improve on these new modern high end detectors, they're rapidly running out of things they can do to make them better but it's great it's no longer dominated by one brand, super happy Nokta and XP have got very competitive machines.

My views are always a bit different when it comes to the Legend though as they priced it the same as an Equinox here, it's not cheaper like the lucky USA buyers get it so it loses that advantage.

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