Had a bit longer to play with the Legend now and pretty much loving it. I've been trying to articulate my thoughts as to why you would pick a Legend over an Equinox 800, which is I suppose the only real question anyone has about the machine. I mean price-wise it's a win (let's not consider price in this), and raw performance seems to be basically equal and pushing the physical limits of VLF, so what sets it apart? I think for me it's the Ferro-check feature. When I had my Equinox 600, I knew that for most of my heavily detected sites I was limited by recovery speed, and I was starting to dig a lot of nails and iron which lead me to pick up the E-TRAC. I was done with digging nails for a while, and wanted something that could give me some better discrimination than just a single number. Knew the recovery speed I was trading for was glacial compared to the Equinox but still, just having a different detector swinging over old ground usually gets results. Dug very few 'bad' targets with the E-TRAC overall I suppose, the target information was really good and had no need to notch out anything other than the first few FE lines (I wonder how much of the above pictured targets I would have snagged with the detector running wide open?). There's a lot of information in the E-TRAC tones too over the Equinox I reckon. In my soils though, I couldn't run it over about 1/3rd power most of the time, and often saw the Auto sensitivity hanging out around 3-5/30. It's just not a contender in the really mineralised environments versus the more modern detectors, the Legend is an absolute laser compared to it, and I reckon the Equinox 800 would be too.
In the 5/30 E-TRAC soils, the Legend will sit on 20-23 sensitivity fairly happily, maybe a little mild chatter to it in some spots. I reckon if I set the Equinox 600 to the same the chatter would be more obnoxious, mostly due to not being able to drop the volume on that first/second tone break. Anyway, that's what I felt was missing from the Equinox, additional target information. No doubt Minelab can chuck that in, but I guess they want you to buy a CTX 4040 when they come out... If the Equinox had something like Ferro-check or the Fe:Co target ID then I probably would have picked up the 800 and resolved my recovery issue instead of the E-TRAC. It's nice with the Legend when you have something like three almost identical sounding targets in a swing that throw up a 30-ish ID in a pile of nails, and only one of them pegs the Ferro-check to the good side, gives you a good feeling that you're working with some useful information to prioritise your digging. And I think the tones of the Legend give you a bit more info than the Equinox, but I can't quantify that. Of course it's not perfect by a long shot, had some iffy Ferro-checks that have resulted in big iron, and conversely some good copper targets. I think in closing you can utilise it to make a detecting session fun, where working with less info with the Equinox it could turn into a slog.
Other early impressions - like the vibrate feature, still wish the global volume went lower, need to order a spare arm cuff as I reckon I'll bust it at some stage (it's better than the Nox's but I went through like 3 of those), and there's a slight creak as I swing sometimes that I haven't tracked down yet but I imagine should be an easy fix, still feels more solid than the Equinox though. Spent more time over ground I did with the Equinox today, some pretty obvious targets jumped out of the ground but quite at the comical rate they did vs the E-TRAC...