People seem to think that it is "instability" that generates all the "chatter" (noise) that results with higher sensitivity. There is certainly a portion of the sounds that fall into the category of noise, but of course this all depends upon how you define noise.
If you are in a room with a lot of people talking and you are having trouble hearing the person that is speaking to you, then you might well say that all of the other people's talking is "noise". This is not really the case as their conversation may be just as important as your's (albeit not in to you).
Suppose you put the Explorer in center of an very large shielded room (electrically "quiet") so that the detector is far away from any shielding metal. Now you turn the sensitivity up to 32, then what you hear can truly be called "noise". There is a certain amount of noise that in inherent with any electrical circuit.
If you take the Explorer out in the middle of the desert and suspend it 100 feet above the ground, then you might get somewhat more "chatter" than in the shield room. This is because the environment is more noisy (resulting from electrical interference).
In a typical hunting environment there are targets that vary from minor ground mineralization (yes, that is a target) to large pieces of metal. The detector responds to all of these depending upon the sensitivity setting. Consider looking up at the sky on a dark night (low sensitivity). You may see lots of stars. Then you look through a telescope (greater sensitivity) and you see how many stars that you could not see with the naked eye." Those stars were there all the time. You just could not see them. It is the same way with sensitivity.
I think that it is safe to say that all hunters would like to have the detector only give a target indication if there is something that they are interested in. The problem is that the detector does not know what you are interested in (except for how you set up the discrimination). But, discrimination comes with a penalty that has been much discussed. It seems reasonable to me that if you want to find silver dimes at 10", then you better have the sensitivity set high enough to generate a modest amount of "chatter". If there is a lot of junk targets or heavy ground mineralization, then finding those deep coins is going to be a real challenge. This is why people use different setups for different conditions.
HH,
Glenn