Best Metal Detector Headphones: Low Latency, Wired and Submersible

Because of delay. Standard Bluetooth audio is buffered, and the buffer is there to stop music stuttering. For music a delay of a fraction of a second is invisible. For detecting it is fatal, because the useful part of a detector signal is its position in time: the tone has to rise and fall while the coil is over the target, so that your ears and your arm agree about where the target is. Move the tone even slightly later and every target appears to be somewhere it is not, and you start cutting holes in the wrong place.

This is why the makers sell their own sets and why the word they print is latency. Minelab describes the ML105 as using enhanced low-latency technology for minimal time delay and a faster detection response. Garrett sells Z-Lynk and describes it in the ACE Apex listing as six times faster than Bluetooth. Nokta sells a Bluetooth low latency set specifically for The Legend. Those are three different radio systems and they are not interchangeable, so match the set to the machine before you match it to the price.

The second hard limit is water. Radio does not travel through water in any useful way, so no wireless set works submerged, whatever its own water rating says. A machine rated to 16 feet, which covers most of the fully waterproof models in the waterproof roundup, is only as useful under water as the wired waterproof headphones plugged into it. That is not a preference, it is physics, and it is the single most common expensive mistake in this category.

Only figures each manufacturer prints appear below. Several listings say nothing about a water rating, and those cells say so. A gap is more useful than an invented number.

Then stop buying audio and start buying vibration, which is a genuine feature on several current machines rather than a gimmick. Nokta publishes vibration alerts on the Nokta Simplex Lite, and Minelab publishes handgrip vibration on the Minelab X-Terra Pro, the Minelab X-Terra Elite, the Minelab Equinox 700 and the Minelab Equinox 900. The handle buzzes when the machine sounds off, so the signal reaches you through your palm rather than your ears. Owners with hearing loss consistently report that this is the feature that keeps them in the hobby.

The other honest answer is volume control on the headphone itself rather than on the machine. Both the Garrett MS-2 Headphones and the Garrett MS-3 Z-Lynk Wireless Headphones publish a volume control intended to lift weak signals, which lets you run the detector at a sensible level and do the lifting at your ear. That is a better arrangement than winding the machine volume up, because a machine at maximum volume flattens the difference between a faint deep signal and a loud shallow one, and that difference is most of what you were listening for.