Chase Goldman

Interesting, because from what I have found (see below) Airpods are definitely not low latency - not even close. Just to confirm, I take it you do not get the "+" symbol next to the Bluetooth (BT) symbol on your Vanquish when your Airpods are paired to the Vanquish. Latency/delay as little as 15ms is noticeable by some detectorists-most proprietary, dedicated detector wireless audio systems (e.g., Minelab Wi-Max, Garrett Z-Lynk, Nokta Makro non-BT wireless, Quest Wireless, and probably the XP Deus/Orx/Deus 2 wireless audio system) have this small level of delay. Note that Bluetooth APTX LL latency tops out at about 40 ms and works well for detecting, though a small number of detectorists find even this level of latency bothersome. Non-LL APTX BT has a latency of 60 to 70 ms and I personally find that to be basically unusable. Most BT protocols (including AAC used for Airpods) can lag as much as 150 to 200 ms. I can't imagine this level of latency being usable for most detectorists. I found the following off the web regarding latency for 1st through 3rd gen airpods: The first-generation AirPods, which use Apple’s W1 chip, measure latency of 274 ms. Second-generation AirPods, released earlier this year [2019] and powered by Apple’s newer H1 chip, drop the latency to 178 ms. And AirPods Pro, which use the same H1 chip, are even better at 144 ms. The 130 ms improvement from the first-generation AirPods to the AirPods Pro might not seem like a lot on paper, Coyle acknowledges, but “the perceptual difference from this makes the AirPods Pro tantalizingly close to seamless.” https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/22/airpods-latency-test/ Well as far as metal detecting is concerened, I wouldn't consider 144 ms of delay "close to seamless". But I can imagine some small percentage of detectorists (including yourself, SwiftSword) can somehow deal or not be bothered with this higher level of delay. The good news for you is that if you can deal with >100ms delays, that opens a whole host of non-APTX-LL phones and true wireless buds that you can pair with your Vanquish. This topic has been discussed several times on the forum. So anyone who is interested in a deeper dive should do a search on APTX Low Latency and you can see the tech specs, facts and wide range of opinions of how wireless audio latency affects the detectorist. Regardless most prefer latency no greater than what is supported by APTX-LL (40ms). Neither here nor there as far as XP detectors are concerned so a bit off topic (unless you want to plug a BT transmitter into the audio output jack on your Deus 2 remote or WS6 Headphones so you can use your Airpods) but just thought I would walk through it again in the interest of anyone who might be considering marrying Airpods to their BT audio compatible detector (Vanquish, Equinox, Legend, and GPX 6000 among others). FWIW

...and the list just keeps getting longer. 😉 jk Looking good. Don't let "spanking" that pesky D2 detract you from more important work, Joe.

It took about four months for me to get over the bad taste with the Equinox release, from the slipping release dates, broken dealer promises on shipping, bad shaft fitup quality, lack of accessory coils. You get over it eventually...for me it was my first gold find w/ the Nox and then an amazing 1 day relic run. Yeah, I got over it.

With non low latency phones, as I would swing across a target it would look like two adjacent one way hit targets offset by the distance associated with my sweep speed and the delay of up to 1/4 sec (faster sweeps made the problem worse). It really wasn't about accurate pinpointing per se. As someone who uses coil motion and rotation vice the pinpoint function to line up targets, it literally drove me bonkers.

Not a button.

Cheeky. Just tells you not to begin practice there. Now that you've cleared the junk out with the Nox you can use Deus 2 to find the REAL treasure.🤣🤣🤣 BTW How goes it with the WS6 repair/replacement?

Good job, Erik! Much more interesting than my back yard. Cool saves.

Wouldn't think they would make things worse (that's not say it's bad now), but my point is the 1.07 fixed IF setting is apparently equivalent to the max IF setting of ver 1.08.

Didn't know Airpods were low latency, so would be interested know if they really are low latency because LL BT true wireless buds are a unicorn. Non-Low Latency BT phones are basically unusable. Anyway, as posted above, a simple adapter allows you to plug the WS4/6 puck into whatever audio headphones/buds/speaker you wish.

Thanks Jeff! Yeah. I love all three of those machines. Deus 2 for the ergonomics/compactness/minimalist/reconfigurable design, killer iron performance, solid beach performance, improved coin shooting over its predecessors, and great all around relic performance in a variety of situations/conditions. If I can take only one detector with me, this is the one, because I can take it with me regardless of whether I'm flying, driving, biking, boating, or hiking to my ultimate detecting destination and it can get the job done when I get there, whatever the situation and conditions might be. Legend for its unmatched killer value, packed features, customer focused and responsive team, great ergonomics and user interface, and promise of an excellent accessory coil selection. I need to give it more love and quietly cheat on the D2 more with it... And finally the 4.5 year old "granddaddy", Equinox, which is still going strong and frankly I think the industry game changer in terms of features and performance for what was at the time, a price point step change. It really set the stage for what was to come and was the catalyst for Deus 2 and Legend. Even though I am spending more time with the new kids on the block, it is still has a few unique tricks up its sleeve and is present in the vehicle when I depart on EVERY metal detecting excursion. And at the end of the day, we are the beneficiaries of this healthy 3-way product competition. Variety is the spice of life and despite the similarities in performance documented by Jeff, one key thing to note from Jeff's controlled adventure is that all three detectors brought their unique advantages to the table when Jeff decided to carpet bomb that patch of ground. If you have the luxury of time, access, and can afford to do it, it never hurts to hit a site with multiple different capable detectors (that you have really taken the time to learn to use to their max capabilities) because regardless of how capable they are in performance, they all also see the ground differently enough such that no one detector is likely to see every keeper buried there.

Since there appears to be a broad range of positive and negative emotional reactions here, I am deleting all but the original post as a general notification to the group, slightly editing the title, and locking the thread for now to avoid it becoming a controversial post-mortem back and forth affair vs. a simple in memoriam posting and thread. Sorry about the heavy hand, but just don’t need this becoming a drama scene. Please take that baggage elsewhere.

Me too. That’s how I would have run Nox too (except I run 50 tones because there is no pitch option).

I guess that's my real question. Did Iffy have a true chirping nail or does NM potentially have the IB/IF too high even at the minimal setting. In other words, is it like the Nox where you really can never turn IB off (even when set to "zero") unless you go to single frequency, in which case IB is non functional on the Nox (because it requires multifrequency in order to do its thing). Which leads me to another question I can't answer without the 1.08 update in hand. Is NM's IF functional even when the Legend is in single frequency? (If yes, that would make Nokta's Iron Filter implementation fundamentally different than Minelab's Iron Bias implementation). Can't wait to get my hands on the Legend 1.08 update and try out the new features, might actually make me put down my other detector for a whole outing. 😄

Re read my revised post and I think you will get the gist of my question (sorry trying to revise/edit on the fly and by the time I’m done three people have responded to the original). The fundamental purpose of Iron Bias/Filtering is to suppress ferrous falsing and instead give a more definitive ferrous signal. The trade off is that you could inadvertently mask actual non ferrous targets that are in the proximity of the ferrous target whose falsing is being suppressed if you apply “too much” IB/IF. The way you described Iffy’s demo, the ferrous target never falsed even at minimum IB/IF so IB/IF was providing no apparent benefit while only introducing down side at higher IF settings since it tended to mask the non ferrous target. So my question really was, does IB/IF actually do what it’s supposed to do and suppress falsing? We know it was apparently introducing masking per Iffy’s video. I postulated a test scenario above (wasn’t in the original version of my post) on how one would go about demonstrating the “optimal” setting where falsing was suppressed in common falsing objects at a given site without masking adjacent non-ferrous. My other point is why would a designer think that it would ever make sense to set a non-adjustable filter to the “max” of the corresponding adjustable version of that same filter (i.e., why was IB/IF internally set at a level corresponding to 8 for the adjustable filter for all these months?). Rhetorical question. It is what it is. Just as long as you can now adjust and optimize it to be effective at suppressing falsing with minimal masking risk is all that matters now. HTH

To be clear, Simon, they weren’t saying IB wasn’t needed they were saying an IB adjustment setting wasn’t needed because the IB default was optimal. They did incorporate an Iron Bias filter from the get go, you just couldn’t fine tune it. And, yes, no one should have taken you to task for pointing that out to them. But here’s the more concerning thing… The discussion of the update by Dilek and the Iffy Signals testing described by Jeff above clearly shows the illogic in Nokta’s original stance that no IB/IF adjustment was necessary. Namely, they apparently hard coded the Iron Bias/Iron Filter default to a MAXIMUM level! Not a split the difference/middle of the road value as you would have expected. The default IB/IF setting is 8 (and Dilek clearly stated in the FB update video that this corresponds to the IB/IF filter strength hard coded default setting in in all pre 1.08 firmware versions). That’s really incredible and concerning all at once. As you can see from the Iffy Signals testing, this setting introduces some really unnecessary non-ferrous masking. So OF COURSE the user should be able to dial back IB/IF to trade masking for falsing and vice versa. Jeff, any idea whether Iffy varied the IF stability (ST) parameter setting and if so how varying it affected the masking/falsing at IF levels less than 7. Haven’t seen the Iffy Signals video, but if I just read your written account of the IF testing, and I’m struggling to understand the purpose of setting IF >1 at all if the end user was not experiencing any falsing whatsoever on the nail. Why take the risk of masking any target by setting IB > 1? Again, I haven’t viewed the video, but a more effective and informative test would be to find an iron target that readily falses at minimum IB/IF settings, then increase IB/IF until the target stops falsing. Then run a test where you introduce an adjacent non-ferrous target and then see how far you can run up IB/IF until the