Wayfarer
Member
I just got an MXT this week after many years of curiosity finally got to try one out. I put in about 6 hours yesterday with the MXT. Before the MXT, my main detector was the VX3 and before that the V3i. I've been using the V3i/VX3 pretty much exclusively for the last two years and know those detectors pretty well, so I can provide some comparisons and observations that may hopefully be of interest to the members here.
First off, my background: I've been detecting for 35 years always with White's machines except for my current nugget hunting detector which is a Gold Bug Pro. By the mid-80's, I was using White's top of the line detector, starting with the 6000D and then graduating to a rainbow XLT when they first came out. The XLT was my main detector for over 10 years until I bought a new XL Pro when they were on closeout in 2005. Glad I did! I did some pretty exhaustive comparison testing between the XLT and XL Pro and finally concluded to my surprise that the performance was pretty much identical, the only advantage of the XLT that really were of any benefit was that the ground balance point was manually adjustable. The XL Pro was far more user friendly and had that sweet analog sound I knew so well from my 6000D days. This was my first leson that newer tech wasn't always better. I still liked the XLT, still have it and like it very much, actually, but it really didn't offer any advantages in actual performance over the much simpler analog XL Pro.
So the XL Pro was my primary detector for the next 7 years until I finally gave in to all the excitement surrounding the V3i. Fall of 2012 I bought a V3i and after several months of struggles and one complete replacement by White's, finally got the hang of it. I found lots of good stuff with the V3i, including some great silver coins from heavily "hunted out" sites. I was doing pretty well but I was also putting in a lot of time. They say you gotta put your coil over it to find it, and I was putting my coil over a lot of ground with my V3i, so I'm not sure if it was the machine or just the time I was putting in, but the V3i did find me some good stuff. However, I never really got over the complexity of the V3i. It wasn't that I didn't understand how the settings worked, I understood exactly what each setting did and fiddled with all the adjustments until I figured it all out. It was just that I couldn't ever *remember* where I had put all the adjustments. ("Hey, why did I stop finding anything? Oh that's right, I'm in 7.5 high pass, or oh yeah, SAT speed is still way high from that patch awhile back, or wait, I'm still at 40 recovery speed from when I was hunting in that trashy area" and so on). There was just too much to mentally keep track of all the time that it was affecting my fun factor. Yes, I know, you don't have to make all those adjustments if you don't want to, you can just leave them at preset, etc., but if it was there, I couldn't resist making the adjustment to see if I could tweak a little extra performance, especially with everyone on the forums saying over and over that you gotta tweak the V3i to get the most out of it.
Anyway, long story a little less long, I finally sold the V3i and bought a VX3 this spring and have been using it exclusively ever since. I really like the VX3, much better than the V3i actually. The performance is the same as far as I can tell, and I haven't missed any of the V3i adjustments that aren't there on the VX3 (except for loctrac ground balance offset, I still really like to be able to manually adjust ground balance, but I can deal with it). The VX3 is a really great detector and I thought I finally found the best detector for my needs, namely hunting hard-hit parks and schools for the occasional passed over silver coin and for gold jewelry and anything else that might be interesting.
Enter the MXT. I've long heard about the MXT's fine qualities, especially in the trash with its fast recovery and simple 3-filter design. My V3i/VX3 never really did that great in heavy trash. Not bad, but not great either. The Gold Bug Pro is actually much better in heavy trash than the VX3. Plus the VX3 doesn't have the most stable VDI, especially past about 4-5". (My XL Pro still has the most stable VDI on deep targets than any detector I've ever had!). Plus, I've never really warmed up to the VERY digital sound of the V-series. So after keeping my eye out, I found a great deal on an MXT (non-pro) that had only been used once to find some property stakes and then put away; it's truly like new. So yesterday I went out to a local park near my house with my new-to-me MXT and my 6x10 White's coil (my favorite coil on the VX3) and put it through its paces in my moderate Idaho soil. My hunting style these days is to dig all gold range targets, especially pull tab range in hopes of finding gold (rarely do I succeed but I have fun testing myself and my machine). Here are my observations:
The MXT is really a fantastic detector! It is just as deep as any of my V-series detector, not any deeper, but just as deep when I ran the MXT at +2 or +3 gain. I was consistently recovering targets down 6-7" with good VDI indications. Old ring-type pull tabs were ID-ing reliably down to 6" and I could often tell up to 7-8" by watching how the numbers bounced on these really deep targets. This put the VDI accuracy of the MXT slightly ahead of my VX3. The MXT was chatty as heck at high gain in Coin & Jewelry mode, but I soon discovered that in Relic mode, it was much quieter and just as deep. So I spent most of the day hunting in Relic mode. The adjustments were super simple and easy, the auto ground balance did a great job, and I was using the original Energizers that the previous owner first put in 5 years ago! The audio had a great analog quality to it. It was like my old XL Pro, it would build up in volume as you swept over the target, much more pleasing than the audio on the VX3 which is more like "ON-OFF," the VX3 just beeps full blast or doesn't make a sound, even with modulation ON a high setting, it has a very digital step-like modulation. The MXT audio had a sweet continuously variable analog-type sound that I missed from earlier times. I think with the VX3/V3i, there is so much digital processing going on, the computer brain does all the processing for you and then decides for you whether to tell you if there is a target there or not, whereas the MXT is an honest machine, just reporting what it is detecting and letting the operator decide for himself what it means. It's hard to describe what I'm talking about with the audio comparison, but I'm sure users of both machines will know what I am talking about. Overall, the MXT was just as deep, a little more accurate in the VDI indications, and a whole lot better audio, especially in Relic mode which wasn't nearly as chattery as Coin & Jewelry.
OK, so where does the VX3 beat the MXT? The screen! The VX3 is simply the best screen ever. I hadn't realized it until it was gone, but I had started to really rely on the "on the fly" depth readout of the V-series. It's nice to sweep the target in discrimination mode and see right away how deep the target is without having to go into pinpoint mode. With the MXT, you have to pinpoint the target to get a depth indication. Not a biggie, but it is a nice feature on the V-series. Second is the Spectragraph. Going all the way back to XLT, the Spectragraph has given me a lot of additional and very useful target information beyond just a VDI number. You can kind of mentally do this yourself on the MXT by mentally keeping track of how the numbers bounce around, but there is just no substitute for the great information presented by the great White's Spectragraph. Last but not least, the three frequency readout in pinpoint on the VX3 is a great tool for picking out closely spaced targets. I don't really use the three frequency to ID the target, but it sure does come in handy when picking out a good target amongst the trash. If you are getting erratic VDI's, especially when the target is relatively shallow, you can use the three frequency bars to pick out the good target from the bad. When you get an erratic VDI that seems to be bouncing around but getting occasional coin numbers, you can pinpoint in 3 freq and very often tell that there is a coin nestled right in next to a nail, a pull tab, a bottle cap or whatever, by watching how the frequency bars suddenly flip their dominant frequency as you slowly sweep the target in pinpoint mode. This technique is actually how I got most of my silver coins in hunted out areas. I really miss that ability on the MXT.
So what is my conclusion? My conclusion is that raw performance of the MXT equals the V-series. The MXT has much better sounding audio and a slightly more accurate VDI. The recovery speed is great on the MXT and reminds me of the old IDX Pro I used to have. The MXT is also FAR simpler to operate. I'm going to begin using the MXT as my primary machine until I really get to learn it and report back. But my initial impressions are that this is one fantastic detector.
Thanks for reading. Hope this was interesting and helpful.
First off, my background: I've been detecting for 35 years always with White's machines except for my current nugget hunting detector which is a Gold Bug Pro. By the mid-80's, I was using White's top of the line detector, starting with the 6000D and then graduating to a rainbow XLT when they first came out. The XLT was my main detector for over 10 years until I bought a new XL Pro when they were on closeout in 2005. Glad I did! I did some pretty exhaustive comparison testing between the XLT and XL Pro and finally concluded to my surprise that the performance was pretty much identical, the only advantage of the XLT that really were of any benefit was that the ground balance point was manually adjustable. The XL Pro was far more user friendly and had that sweet analog sound I knew so well from my 6000D days. This was my first leson that newer tech wasn't always better. I still liked the XLT, still have it and like it very much, actually, but it really didn't offer any advantages in actual performance over the much simpler analog XL Pro.
So the XL Pro was my primary detector for the next 7 years until I finally gave in to all the excitement surrounding the V3i. Fall of 2012 I bought a V3i and after several months of struggles and one complete replacement by White's, finally got the hang of it. I found lots of good stuff with the V3i, including some great silver coins from heavily "hunted out" sites. I was doing pretty well but I was also putting in a lot of time. They say you gotta put your coil over it to find it, and I was putting my coil over a lot of ground with my V3i, so I'm not sure if it was the machine or just the time I was putting in, but the V3i did find me some good stuff. However, I never really got over the complexity of the V3i. It wasn't that I didn't understand how the settings worked, I understood exactly what each setting did and fiddled with all the adjustments until I figured it all out. It was just that I couldn't ever *remember* where I had put all the adjustments. ("Hey, why did I stop finding anything? Oh that's right, I'm in 7.5 high pass, or oh yeah, SAT speed is still way high from that patch awhile back, or wait, I'm still at 40 recovery speed from when I was hunting in that trashy area" and so on). There was just too much to mentally keep track of all the time that it was affecting my fun factor. Yes, I know, you don't have to make all those adjustments if you don't want to, you can just leave them at preset, etc., but if it was there, I couldn't resist making the adjustment to see if I could tweak a little extra performance, especially with everyone on the forums saying over and over that you gotta tweak the V3i to get the most out of it.
Anyway, long story a little less long, I finally sold the V3i and bought a VX3 this spring and have been using it exclusively ever since. I really like the VX3, much better than the V3i actually. The performance is the same as far as I can tell, and I haven't missed any of the V3i adjustments that aren't there on the VX3 (except for loctrac ground balance offset, I still really like to be able to manually adjust ground balance, but I can deal with it). The VX3 is a really great detector and I thought I finally found the best detector for my needs, namely hunting hard-hit parks and schools for the occasional passed over silver coin and for gold jewelry and anything else that might be interesting.
Enter the MXT. I've long heard about the MXT's fine qualities, especially in the trash with its fast recovery and simple 3-filter design. My V3i/VX3 never really did that great in heavy trash. Not bad, but not great either. The Gold Bug Pro is actually much better in heavy trash than the VX3. Plus the VX3 doesn't have the most stable VDI, especially past about 4-5". (My XL Pro still has the most stable VDI on deep targets than any detector I've ever had!). Plus, I've never really warmed up to the VERY digital sound of the V-series. So after keeping my eye out, I found a great deal on an MXT (non-pro) that had only been used once to find some property stakes and then put away; it's truly like new. So yesterday I went out to a local park near my house with my new-to-me MXT and my 6x10 White's coil (my favorite coil on the VX3) and put it through its paces in my moderate Idaho soil. My hunting style these days is to dig all gold range targets, especially pull tab range in hopes of finding gold (rarely do I succeed but I have fun testing myself and my machine). Here are my observations:
The MXT is really a fantastic detector! It is just as deep as any of my V-series detector, not any deeper, but just as deep when I ran the MXT at +2 or +3 gain. I was consistently recovering targets down 6-7" with good VDI indications. Old ring-type pull tabs were ID-ing reliably down to 6" and I could often tell up to 7-8" by watching how the numbers bounced on these really deep targets. This put the VDI accuracy of the MXT slightly ahead of my VX3. The MXT was chatty as heck at high gain in Coin & Jewelry mode, but I soon discovered that in Relic mode, it was much quieter and just as deep. So I spent most of the day hunting in Relic mode. The adjustments were super simple and easy, the auto ground balance did a great job, and I was using the original Energizers that the previous owner first put in 5 years ago! The audio had a great analog quality to it. It was like my old XL Pro, it would build up in volume as you swept over the target, much more pleasing than the audio on the VX3 which is more like "ON-OFF," the VX3 just beeps full blast or doesn't make a sound, even with modulation ON a high setting, it has a very digital step-like modulation. The MXT audio had a sweet continuously variable analog-type sound that I missed from earlier times. I think with the VX3/V3i, there is so much digital processing going on, the computer brain does all the processing for you and then decides for you whether to tell you if there is a target there or not, whereas the MXT is an honest machine, just reporting what it is detecting and letting the operator decide for himself what it means. It's hard to describe what I'm talking about with the audio comparison, but I'm sure users of both machines will know what I am talking about. Overall, the MXT was just as deep, a little more accurate in the VDI indications, and a whole lot better audio, especially in Relic mode which wasn't nearly as chattery as Coin & Jewelry.
OK, so where does the VX3 beat the MXT? The screen! The VX3 is simply the best screen ever. I hadn't realized it until it was gone, but I had started to really rely on the "on the fly" depth readout of the V-series. It's nice to sweep the target in discrimination mode and see right away how deep the target is without having to go into pinpoint mode. With the MXT, you have to pinpoint the target to get a depth indication. Not a biggie, but it is a nice feature on the V-series. Second is the Spectragraph. Going all the way back to XLT, the Spectragraph has given me a lot of additional and very useful target information beyond just a VDI number. You can kind of mentally do this yourself on the MXT by mentally keeping track of how the numbers bounce around, but there is just no substitute for the great information presented by the great White's Spectragraph. Last but not least, the three frequency readout in pinpoint on the VX3 is a great tool for picking out closely spaced targets. I don't really use the three frequency to ID the target, but it sure does come in handy when picking out a good target amongst the trash. If you are getting erratic VDI's, especially when the target is relatively shallow, you can use the three frequency bars to pick out the good target from the bad. When you get an erratic VDI that seems to be bouncing around but getting occasional coin numbers, you can pinpoint in 3 freq and very often tell that there is a coin nestled right in next to a nail, a pull tab, a bottle cap or whatever, by watching how the frequency bars suddenly flip their dominant frequency as you slowly sweep the target in pinpoint mode. This technique is actually how I got most of my silver coins in hunted out areas. I really miss that ability on the MXT.
So what is my conclusion? My conclusion is that raw performance of the MXT equals the V-series. The MXT has much better sounding audio and a slightly more accurate VDI. The recovery speed is great on the MXT and reminds me of the old IDX Pro I used to have. The MXT is also FAR simpler to operate. I'm going to begin using the MXT as my primary machine until I really get to learn it and report back. But my initial impressions are that this is one fantastic detector.
Thanks for reading. Hope this was interesting and helpful.
But I hope it's enjoyable to hear my "How I came to discover the MXT" story. Now that I know myself how good the MXT is, I'm sure this is a happy story that has been told many times before
