Someone pointed out that ground balancing a standard detector + or - has basically the same affect as turning iron mask on or off. Doing this in both cases affects the sensitivity to mineralization, hot rocks and iron. But it didn't explain the increased sensitivity to electrical interference but If Minelab uses the frequencies to compensate for mineralization as they described as being similar to auto ground tracking in the discrimination mode it might be possible that the iron mask switch could shift the frequencies to be more or less aggressive similar to the track offset on the Whites XLT. If it does this using different frequencies this would explain why it affects the sensitivity to EM also.