Jason,
Great observation. I think the current Golden represents the best determination by the Tesoro folks on what people wanted, how they'd use it, and more importantly, what it costs. Mikes right. ....each feature adds to the pricetag, and depending on which one it is, can significantly raise the stakes of affordability.
I agree with your estimate. I actually favor tone id over VID (probably an age thing at this point. . . .I hear better than I see), and make the same case for the Vaq. Possibly, toneid with a toggle for either normal/tone id mode. For the golden, it may be helpful to see them add an additional knob for GB, which would help significantly in areas where mineralization is either high, or irregular over the area, and give the operator some way to compensate. Pre-sets have that minor drawback, the trade-off being one less knob/setting to configure and a more 'turn on a go' operation vs. another knob to configure/set, and possibly do it incorrecly.
The hitch to addding GB on this version of the Golden however, would be to tie the affect of ground balancing to the discriminate mode as well. Its big brother the Cortez has manual GB, BUT, only for the All Metal mode. . ..it switches to pre-set GB mode when in disc. This, IMHO, kinda' defeats the ability to control/tune/tweak your settings, especially with most of us hunting predominantly in the discriminate mode.
I don't think it would be a big deal to GB to the Golden, but I'm sure that Tesoro had it's reason for leaving it off. I have an earlier model of the Golden, love the notch and it's simplicity to use. In most places, it's more than ample in depth, regularly finding coins easily at 5-6", large coins a bullets slightly deeper. There have also been areas I've been in where it depth was impacted significantly, requiring me to switch to one of the GB machines so that I could compensate for the ground issues and hunt effectively.
Best, and HH -
-Ric
