It was interesting reading JB & Monte's posts. I've only been been using Tesoro's for a year. I started with a Cortes, then got a Golden and loved it so much I sold the Cortes. Most of the sites where I get to hunt are modern and the Golden does fine. The only deep stuff I've dug was junk iron, so I can't really tell you anything about depth, but the way I look at it, if I find a site where I need depth I'll switch to a larger coil and I got a 11" widescan just for that purpose. Here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, all I use is the widescan coils.
My take is that it has a pretty decent response speed and combined with the widescans it just recovers great. Love using it on softball field sidelines where tabs and bottle caps are thick.
The main thing that takes some getting used to is the double beep used for the saturation tone. That seems to be the most common objection to the machine.
I haven't got to map it out yet. I'll map the notch and the notch width, and disc range so I can understand exactly what I'm doing when I set it. For now I pretty much run it wide open until the audio gets to much, then I disc out the iron, and if still too noisy, I'll flick to narrow notch and adjust with a nickel, maybe raise disc to drop the foil. Sometimes go to wide notch if its still to noisy for my ears
I've been looking for another machine that works simular to my Bounty Hunter Tracker IV, and it seems like the Golden Sabre II could foot the bill. Tesoro sent me a manual for one and it has the feature I'm looking for,plus it was only discontinued in 1999, so its not that old. I'll ponder it for awhile longer but I think I probally see if I can find one. You may want to check it out as well. I don't know which is older of the two?
Monte said something about notching being a thing of the past (not exact words) but I would disagree. I found that this tone id audio thing works great for me, but I can only take so much noise! The notches give me more selective control over what noise I remove. With the GOlden, I can run it as a 4 tone machine, or a 3 tone machine, or a 2 tone machine, or a single tone machine depending on what disc & notch combinations I use.
I won't part with my Golden, (the wife wouldn't let me even if I wanted to, she really likes it too

) but I wouldn't mind having it's older sister (Golden Sabre II) around either.
Good luck making your choice,
Mike