I recently purchased two ESP 20 External Speakers and they seem to not be that loud. Was this the right speaker to go with? I am using them with my BCD396xt and my 396t. It seems that the speaker on the scanner is louder than the ESP20.
You want to get an *amplified* extension speaker. I don't believe the ESP20 is of the amplified variety.
Radio Shack sells one or two models, there are some old Motorola speakers on places like eBay (you have to re-wire them properly), and I bet there are a few others I am missing.
Another reason why it might not be as loud as you expect is because most handhelds have a volume limiting circuit on the headphone jack. I might be wrong but i know my radios headphone outs are not loud
I use an older Speco amplified speaker in the car. I noticed that my PSR-500 is almost overpowering on it, while I have to turn up my 396XT pretty good to get it loud. BTW, I don't have the paperclip mod done to my 500. It's simply much louder at the headphone jack.
The problem is all mondern Uniden scanners have weak unfiltered audio. Even when its loud it sounds terrible. The headphone jack is antenuated so hooking up anything but an amplified speaker is pointless. Even an amplified speaker will barely cut it in a mobile application because the originating audio is to weak to effectively drive a larger speaker. Even the 996XT external speaker output is weak and the audio level present is not near what Uniden says it is. They claim 2 watts of audio output but your lucky if .5 watts reaches the speaker. Have fun experimenting with the audio. It can be fustrating at times but it can be fixed.