MX Sport...more info

Okay, so I have had my Sport approx 3 months now. That's not a lot of time really, but I think I can give you all a fair shake down of the machine from my standpoint now. Well; a lot better than when I first got it anyway.

Remember that mine is still the 2nd version firmware and not the latest...so some of these issues I am finding, may already be addressed and fixed.

I will give a run down on what I like and do not like about it so far, and some of the issues I have encountered.

LIKES:

It can ID pretty decent in bad ground. If you balance right beside a buried target...whether planted or in the wild, it does a really good job at being able to tell whether something is iron or not iron at pretty decent depths; and if it is a coin, it does a good job to about 7 or 8 inches of telling you what it is. That is great to me. I'm happy with that.

The audio is spaced out in a pleasing way to my ears; in 2 tone and 4 tone. I don't too like the other tone options that much though.

I like the waterproof part of it.

It has a nice big display.

It is not a depth demon machine but it still does pretty good in the ground.

It has a love for round things. I've dug more indian head cents and older coins with this machine in 3 months, than I have with any other single machine that I've owned. But at the same time, it doesn't like none round things. Good for coin hunting; not so good for relics unless you are talking buttons.

There is a lot of potential here for a really good machine platform. But it ain't quite there yet.

DISLIKES:

It is very cheap feeling and I honestly think this is where the waterproof part of this machine is going to bite Whites in the butt. They are already having issues with the screen corners cracking; I saw several people posting pictures of this on Facebook yesterday. Mine hasn't cracked but I am keeping a close eye on it now. The arm cuff is very thin plastic and is going to be easily broken. Mine creaks and squeeks like an old barn door when I swing it; the noise comes from the grip and stem area. Mine also had sharp edges on the grip where the mold came together; I put tennis racket tape around mine.

In my firmware version, the modulation feature does not work. And I am fairly certain the iron grunt feature doesn't work as it is supposed to either. I can change mine to every number option it has on it, and can't hear a difference; it gives the same iron grunt no matter what...even when it is supposed to be off. Of course, the pinpoint audio is weak in this version too.

The detector also seems to take crazy spells and then will clear up. Here is a great example of what I am talking about...I encountered this several times today. I was hunting an open field with some pretty hot ground and I could tell the machine needed to be ground balanced by the ground noise I was hearing. So I hold the ground balance button down and start pumping the coil...and the machine would NOT balance to the ground. I could turn the machine off and then back on again, and it would balance just fine. Sometimes it seems like it just takes a spell and "gets hung up" and requires a cycle of the power to get it out of the loop. I've also had occasions where the machine would start giving false/ghost signals that would fade in and out. I first thought it might be a battery issue so I put some brand new Energizers in there and it still does it every now and then. This was way more prominent when I run in 4 or 8 tone mode.

The 6x10 coil floats too bad for any good use in water.

Pigtail for headphones...NOT a fan of the pigtail system. The only way around this for now, is to use the Whites waterproof headphones...which plugs straight into the machine without a pigtail. Fortunately they are pretty decent phones for land and have decent audio. BUT they do not have drain holes for water to come out of. So in the water, if you submerge your head...they will and do catch water and you will be taking them off your head to let the water drain out. Not cool on that part.

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Like I say...some of these things may be fixed in the current version. I don't really know. I wonder what ground filter system they used on this machine? It doesn't seem to hunt very stable in bad ground; the ground balance has to be spot on with it, or you hear so much ground noise that it is tiresome. So if you are in bad ground...this means you will be ground balancing the machine A LOT. I tried ground tracking ON but that didn't seem to help too much. I also tried running it in Prospecting and ALL METAL modes to see if I could find a combination that worked pretty good and I wasn't able to come up with anything. I tried various SAT numbers and dropped the sensitivity too.

Bottom line here...if you have 4 or 5 bar dirt in most of your sites...you probably aren't going to like this machine. 3 bar dirt it runs very smooth though.

This platform has potential to make a really nice detector; they just ain't quite got there with the Sport yet. I hope they will continue to update it. I want to keep trying to compare it to the CTX 3030 machine for some reason. At the site I was at today, we ran the CTX there a couple of times.

To me, there seems to be no middle ground or compromise with machines. The CTX ran smooth as butter in the soil there...I mean it purred like a kitten. But it wouldn't hit a minie ball beyond 4 inches there; well it would...it would just give an all iron signal. I liked everything about the CTX except for that very thing. The Sport is right the opposite. It doesn't hunt in the soil smoothly at all; requires a ton of ground balancing and a lot of false signals. BUT when you did locate a bullet or coin, it could ID it as a good target down to a respectable depth. I wish I could blend the two together.

Sorry for the babbling and rambling on.

Excellent review! Good read. Thank you for taking the time to write it up.


Dean

Great review Daniel.-----Nice to hear from a guy on the MX Sport that tells it like it is (like he sees it)---"warts & all"!

Great review. Glad I held out on buying this MD. Went with the R2 instead. Like to see your review on the latest firmware in your area.

Thanks Daniel. Alot of the same i seen with it.. just too many issues for me.. whites should never have released it til most everything was right.. a glitch or two is ok but so many things are not working properly yet..

Excellent review, Daniel.

I've had my Sport for a day less than 2 weeks and have put between 25 and 30 hours on it. 1st batteries lasted between 20 and 25 hours, using headphones and no backlighting.
I also have the Nokta FORS Relic and thought/still think the addition of the MXSport will make a nice one-two punch for relic hunting.
I used both yesterday, not side by side, unfortunately, though I think this is a natural for an in-depth video: a head-to-head Relic vs MXSport on the same non-dug targets. My gut feel is they are pretty much neck and neck for finding good targets, with the edge going to the MXSport for digging less trash. I could be wrong. The dirt I've been in has ranged from 1 to 2 bars (MXSport gage reference), 2 to 3 bars, and 3 to 4 bars. I've been swinging in some pretty tall wheat stubble, too, and that may have missed me some good targets, but the ones I've found have banged pretty strong, ie, 5 wheat cents, IHP, minie ball, 50 cal round ball, buck balls, 22 cal bullets, 22 cal short casing, several OLD shotgun brasses (some quite deep), and numerous clad coins.

Sometimes you can tell the commenter's loyalties by what they say: MXSport - built like a tank; First Texas - flimsy. Well this is my first White's. And its the first detector I've had that the upper shaft still wobbled after tightening the cam lock. And it's the first machine I've had where I can feel the coil wobble at the end of the swing because the plastic end of the shaft twists/flexes under the weight and momentum of the swinging coil. Oh, it has the weight of a tank, alright, but, unfortunately, not the strength or rigidity.
I did get rid of the wobble in the upper shaft to handle assembly by turning the upper shaft over and pulling on the cam lock while tightening it, but I don't know how long that's going to last once I start swinging it again.

The pigtail is a bit of a pain the way it swings and flaps around while swinging the coil, but I cured that by using one of the little thin wrap-things that are often used for securing the coil cable to the shaft, and wrapping it around the pigtail connector and slipping that connector through the gap between the battery case body and the stand on the bottom of it, and then wrapping the tail of the wrap-thingy around the stand to keep it in place. Works very nicely! I DO LIKE the lightweight headphones supplied with the MXSport.

I've been running mostly in Relic mode and C&J. I'm getting used to the Mixed Audio in Relic where the threshold might reveal a target that the disc side does not register. And then I thought about the threshold I was hearing while in C&J and wondered what advantage it might be offering. I couldn't think of any so I silenced the threshold (0) and hunting in silent mode sounded so much better. I've only used the 4 tone setting in all modes and like it, though I wish the tones had more spread between them.

I am supposed to have the latest version firmware, though when I called White's, the only info I got regarding version was if SAT went to 8, I had the latest version, and at this time there are no other updates.

Well, like Daniel, I see no difference when Audio Modulation is on or off. I see no difference when Iron Grunt is on or off. Additionally, I see no difference when VCO is on or off. According to what I got when talking to White's, VCO on should change the pitch as the distance between target and coil changes. And Audio Modulation should change the volume as the distance between target and coil changes. Neither has any effect that I can see.

I have found no frequency shift setting that will eliminate interference from my Garrett Carrot. BUT, and this is a but, I had practically no audible EMI interference with the MXSport in an area where I have always experienced extreme audible EMI using my Racer and Relic. The but, here, is that the source of the EMI MIGHT have been off during my two visits with the MXSport. I'll just have to see what future visits reveal but it might be a while before that area is available to me due to summer camp use.

I, too, have heard the ghost signals that Daniel mentions, both with the included White's headphones and my Sun Ray Pro Golds. White's said it could come from having Audio Modulation on. He (Steve Howard) said he prefers having it turned off.

The MXSport has a lot of horsepower (high gain), and I think that I tend to run sensitivity higher than necessary, which leads to lots of falsing and one-way, non-repeatable tones. I turned the sensitivity down while swinging over some surface targets and found that I could turn the sensitivity down to 4 or 5 and hear a lot less noise without losing much depth in air. I need to try this on in-ground targets (dummy) to see how that works. I strongly recommend wearing footwear that does not have any metal in them while using the MXSport.

[added comment] I ordered the optional 6x10 DD coil with my Sport. I was going to mount the 6x10 for the 1st time yesterday but found that I had lost the nut to the coil bolt. First time that's ever happened to me. And I had just told Steve Howard at White's the day before that I think EVERY optional coil that is sold or supplied by EVERY detector manufacturer ought to come with bolt, nut, and spacers so that if one breaks or is lost when changing coils, the coil being changed to will, at least, have its own mounting hardware. And the reason the nut was lost is because the coil ears on the stock coil are very, very, very tight. Very tight! So, all I did was barely snug up the nut. Then when I lost the nut and went to mount the 6x10 coil, its ears were very, very loose and I didn't have the nut to snug up the coil. My recommendation is to mount the coil with the bolt on the right and the nut on the left. That way, the nut is not hidden by the cable and you can tell if it loosens! (Wish somebody had told me that.)

That's about all I can think to add to this discussion for now. Except, like Daniel, I feel the MXSport is a good offering right now, but it is far from being what it can and ought to be.

Wayne

Pleasant Garden, NC
AT Max, Nokta Impact, MX Sport, Nokta FORS Relic, GPX 4800, Infinium, Racer, Deus, F75SE, Nautilus DMC II (order of acquisition, last to first)

Does an archeologist argue with a plow? A bureaucrat with a bulldozer?



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 06/26/2016 05:14PM by ncwayne.

fantastic report/review....thanks....

I'm really glad I went with the R2 also considering I've got the kind of bad soil you describe....

White's created a real fiasco by releasing the MXS too early and it really shows the complexity
of the HW/SW interaction in these newer detectors...and getting it 'right'...

I really hope they will consider user upgradeable SW in the future...and I can't believe you don't
get a version # when you power up the MXS....pretty sad....they've really stubbed their toe on this one!

Good report, Daniel and Wayne.

HH
Mike

Some day that detector you have been longing for will be manufactured. I have good dirt here in PA with a mixture of bad dirt blended in here and there. Mostly it is in the county north of me. I have seen the CTX default to single numbers in auto plus 3. I would jack it up in manual, but then it would become noisy and I'm not sure I got anymore depth out of it. I hunted a very old house, but came away with clad and one wheat. At the time the CTX is all I had to hunt with. I have the Racer 2 now and I need to take it there to see how it performs. My guess is not very well.

IMO, here is what happened with the MXS. I don't know any of this to be fact, so this is just the best guesstimate from an ole TN hillbilly.

I think the engineers and R&D folks at Whites were onto something pretty decent with what became the MX Sport. I think they had a basic functioning machine and still wanted to iron some things out with it before sending it to the market. My guess is that the upper management was pushing for a release date window before the water hunting season started, and the developers were rushed into everything to meet this window deadline....finished or not. Instead of pushing back the release date and ironing out these little glitches and bugs, they decided to roll with it and now you have what you have.

I have been quietly lurking in the shadows to see how Whites handles these problems and to what extend they are correcting the issues. Some folks have gotten entirely new machines and have ran into the same problems with the brand new ones. One of the guys on Facebook sent his in for the corner crack problem and they sent him a new unit. He said it came and he opened it, and it was the same way out of the box. Like I said, mine doesn't have cracked corners but it is something to be watchful for...as that would be a compromised location for water to seep through. In fact, I am wondering if maybe some of my problems are possibly from water or moisture. I never noticed the issue like the GBing problem and such until after my first water hunt with it. And at the same time, it has been extremely hot and humid here. You can go outside and be sweating from the heat and humidity in mere minutes of being outside. I'm really not sure. The machine is somewhat functional but to be honest with you, it is not one I would recommend going out and buying right now. I would wait and see if they get a grip on some of these issues before jumping in with it. I told both of my hunting buddies this same thing and what do they do? Both of them go buy one. They saw what all I have been finding with mine and couldn't stand it anymore.

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I've not ran the Racer 2 but I have owned the original red Racer and the Relic. Neither of those machines fared well at all in the site I mentioned in the earlier post above; in being able to ID a previously located target, or when searching in general.

I'm probably actually going to go the route of an AT Gold or get a CTX 3030 for the water hunting. I haven't owned the Gold yet but did have a few AT Pros. AquaChigger says he prefers the Gold over the Pro for water hunting. I dunno...but my tendency is to trust the man that can find 5 or 6 cannonballs, a gun, and a plate on his hunts LOL

Daniel, I think you are spot on with your guesstimate. As an engineer I've seen it happen countless times first hand. Unfortunately, the bottom line ($$$) is the deciding factor when you are faced with the release dates of products that are close but not quite ready for prime time.

The formula is simple but the result often sucks for both the consumer and the customer service rep that has to deal with phone calls from irate customers and the pursuant warranty repair process.

When deadlines are drawing near on a product that isn't quite ready for release management and accounting often have meetings that exclude engineering. The cost of postponing the release date until all the wrinkles are ironed out (delayed sales revenue, advertising/release updates etc.) is weighed against the cost of warranty repairs including shipping, repair tech costs, lost sales due to bad press resulting from dissatisfied customers etc. Most of the time, the option with the better bottom line wins out. Meanwhile, the consumer that has laid out his/her hard earned cash for a shiny new (in this case) detector ends up with a substandard product that has to be returned for warranty repair or update before it can even be used.

It's capitalism at its finest. When the competition is spanking your little bottom blue you can't afford to delay getting a product to market and potentially lose sales. After all, Johnny Consumer has got monkey on his back and is itching to buy latest and greatest thing to hit the market. If he doesn't buy your product right this instant there is a chance his attention will be caught by your closest competitor and bango you've lost a sale.
However, if your product hits the shelf first and he snatches it up you've got his money in the bank NOW. Repair costs can be written off next quarter after you've generated enough revenue to offset it and your bottom line is in good shape.

When you the consumer discover the problem and call them they will tell you the customer is always right and that they will take care of it immediately at no cost to you. The catch is, you're not the customer and therefore you're not always right until they've got your money in their pocket.

Pretty slick huh.......

I will try to walk gently here yet carry a big stick.

First and foremost if someone never uses an overall better detector for depth and or separation-- they will really never know what they are missing.

Second,,,it seems to me the US detector makers during the last almost a decade--- haven't paid enough attention overall to separation,,iron handling.

White's is part of this pack it seems.

I also think some where some how,,some of the top brass at White's never thought folks would opt for foreign made units vs domestic made-- wrong of course!!

A few warning shots have been fired over the bow during the last at least 5 years,,,and it would have been even earlier I think if the Goldmaxx detector would have been sold in USA.

So Xp, Minelab, Makro, Nokta, and some others fired the shots over the bow.

And what has been White's response???
A treasure Pro and a MX Sport,and a MX 5.

No so called flagship,,and remember the At Pro has been gobbling up sales for years now too,,,and how long did it take for the MX Sport to emerge??

I am a very open minded person,,,and perceptive too,,,and White's here are not the only ones I think who need to get their acts together.

You see the cogs turning real fast it seems with Makro and Nokta.

And what happens if one of them release another what I call,,,,best bang for the buck detector,,and don't think saying this this way is saying best buck detector is somehow a mediocre performer--- quite the opposite.

I see possible mergers coming domestically-- in order for them to survive,,time will tell I'm sure.

Minelab had not better be standing around either,,I see them vulnerable as well,, especially with the cost of their flagships.

The domestic detector makers,,,could learn a great deal just from reading forums,,,and not manufacturer specific forums-- we all know what you'll find there.

All I can say is seeing is believing,,,I see an unfortunate pattern for the domestic detector makers,,,and I see some of the younger detector manufacturers going for the gusto-- and have already produced some mighty fine units for the price.

If any detector manufacturer contacted me and asked for my opinion--- I would give them my honest opinion and could more than likely back up my opinion with some actual experiences I've had during the last 5 years.

What would I charge for offering my opinion???
Absolutely nothing.

Maybe this tailspin of sorts I see currently will get straightened out.

Fisher, White's, Tesoro, Garrett--- it is time for some new flagship detectors-- no doubt about it.