Just my two cents worth but I am speaking from about 23 years of experience and as a Sovereign user who owns a meter.
The very successful hunters in the early days of my metal detecting career, could discern a target on a machine that had only one tone and no variable tones. Don't ask me how, but I could tell demoninations of coins very accurately by listening to the subtle differences the machine would display in the tone on varied coins. Some of the older guys on here, I am 56, can probably back me up on this. I had a run of the mill Bounty Hunter Red Baron, that was when Bounty Hunter made a pretty competitive machine but it was good enough to tell the differences in that single tone, there was only the same old tone for everything, once I listened to it enough and learned that certain coins would have some small varience in the same tone. For example, a silver dime may cause the tone to last just a millisecond less than a silver quarter. If you were there and heard it for the first time, you would never pick it up but after weeks and months of practice, you would be able to tell the diffence. A copper penny may have had a little almost inaudible squeal at the end of the tone as the coil passed of the target. Again, something you could hardly hear but once you practiced, you could pick it up. This is one of the reasons that the enhanced earphones were and still are all the rage and why you see all of the serious folks using high grade earphones and not the off the shelf earbuds that cost 4 bucks.
Now to talk about the problem with this with the Sovereign. The variable tone mode, gives you so many tones to try to learn for so many different targets, it is near impossible to learn them all. For example, a 10k wedding band will give a distinctly different tone than a 10k Class ring. Same metal, different tone due to the size. This is the same as a Whites machine with an ID meter. A true silver dime gives a different meter reading than a true silver quarter. The difference is the size. If the Whites machine had variable tone, and I think they may have now, the tones for the two coins would be different also even though they are both made of silver. The Infinium tones the same for the gold no matter what the size is and does the same for the silver. The only exception I have found yet is that some really light silver, like a toe ring, that is really tiny will fool the Infinium into thinking it is gold. Same with a small silver bracelet or chain. If you look back at my finds posted on here, you will see that most of my silver finds are all small items or chains. The larger ones I dug on the dry sand with the Minelab Sovereign Elite.
The folks that find the best stuff are the ones who dig it all. Even as a seasoned hunter, I am guilty of passing up iffy signals and I know I have probably passed up some good things as a result. It is all about how much time I have an where I want to concentrate my efforts. If I have all day, I may spend more time digging iffy stuff but if I have two hours, I am going to dig the strong most probable gold signals. Save the iron reject function on some good machines and that is about it. Look at the success folks using the Excalibure have. Why do you think Minelab has never tried to put a meter on the Excal. If you hear a tone that is in the good range, (smooth and mellow), no matter what the ID meter is saying, dig it. If you start relying on a meter to make the dig decision for you, you will miss out on a lot of good targets. What happens is that you get conditioned to things that register junk. You dig junk after junk after junk and the meter is telling you that the number represents junk. Guess what, that 20th junk signal, (Pull Tab), is probably a gold ring. Maybe two in a row, maybe three. But because you previously dug 20 pull tabs in a row, you start ignoring the pull tabs which could be gold. I know the Sovereign has ques to let you know its a pull tab but guess what, those are audible and not digital meter ques. Goes back to the old listen to your machine deal.
I will close with this. Don't get lazy. If you use a meter, in my opinion it is just a crutch. My meter came with the Sovereign that I bought used. It was in the deal. I used it twice and then bagged it.
Hope this old timer's words of wisdom helps some. Just my experience talking.
