It's not like you plan to turn right around and sell it, right? So just bite the bullet and know that if you pop for it... you'll be good to go for a long long time.
With the way these X models have the nice coaxial tweeter on there... as long as the recording you're playing back was recorded HiRes as well... you get amazing fidelity!
What I've kinda come to conclusion of is.. it's those high frequencies of the sounds that really make or break just how real you and they perceive it to be. And I say that because of also using this lil Pocket Prey digital caller. It's just a tiny lil like 2.5" diameter speaker, but since the pre-recorded sound it's playing back is just this baby rabbit in distress sorta thing... it doesn't need a big driver for that,since that sound doesn't have really anything in the way of lower freqs in it. And that piercing quality of the high freqs seems to be what really brings them in.
Remember, they can hear up to 44kHz, whereas Humans, it's about 20Hz to 20kHz. So they walk around all damn day keying in on that hi sounds the various rodentia will be making. Y'ever seen a dog standing over a Gopher hole with his ears up and head cocked to one side? It's them listening in for those high faint freqs made by them under the ground. Things like the shuffle of their feet, their squeeks and squeals. The little short staccato squeaks Ground Squirrels make. The little "bit" sound Quail make. You get the idea.
Another gentleman on here was telling me about how like 35 of the ones he's taken have been from a particular call. And that call sounds has two variants.... one with the growling of an adult yote... blended in with these distress wimperings from a pup. The other variant is just the pup part of the sounds by itself. And they definitely work. I can attest to that. (My AR was traffic jammed, so the trigger was locked up solid, talk about angering!!)
I dunno... to me it just makes sense that a unit that can reproduce a far greater frequency range is gonna bring em in many times better than something like that POS lil ICOTec GC300 I started off with. To me that thing sounded like a glorified tin-can on a tight-string. Obviously I'm exaggerating here, but you get what I mean.
The nice big lithium battery unit itself, to me, make the units worth it already, because those lithium energizers at the store are pricey as hell, and that adds up real quick. And you don't dare use regular alkaline batteries for fear of them rupturing and ruining the inside of the unit in the kinda heat you sometimes find yourself in out there.
