Practice with it and dont get discouraged! There are a lot ot tones going on:
1. The doubble blip, indicating large/shallow target overload
2. The "rolling flute" tone, indicating iron.
3. The four regular tones....
Low - iron
Medium I - foil through pulltab. This includes nickles.
Medium II - pulltab through screwcap
High - cents through halves
That is a total of SIX differing audio responses that can be heard. This "symphony of sound" can be disconcerting to the new Golden user.
Secondly, Medium I and II are close together in audio frequency, so can be further confusing to some people. Keep in mind that there really are only three ranges we need to be concerned with:
Low range; Iron
Mid range: foil through screwcap small worked gold, nickels, pulltabs and gold rings, pendants and jewelry of all sorts. I once found a set of front teeth, made of solid dental gold (18K) They rung in at the same point as screwcaps.
High - coins
You'll note my emphasis here on the midrange. The Golden has Tesoro's Expanded Discrimination (ED-120) and the midrange is opened up, having TWO tones of its own. I like to think of it like this: 20% of the scale is for high end coins, 10% is for the low end iron. This leaves 70% of the total span DISC for the middle.
The reason is easy to figure out: Iron and high coins are easy to determine, due to their predictable conductivity. But that vast midrange has a lot of target possibilties, and so benefits from being expanded. Them folks at Tesoro are prety smart, it seems.
The thing to do with the Golden is to use it and dig anything that gives clean, repeatable signals. Listen carefully to the different tones and get to know what they are telling you. When you get on some clean ground, crank it up into the "boost" range and listen for the subtle clicks and pops that indicate deeper targets. Do this on ground that has some age on it and you might get some good surprises.
Do some testing of common targets at home, too. Once you build familiarity with the Golden, you'll see that it is a very capable detector.
