I think what many people here were trying to say about subwoofers - is just because you have one doesn't mean you'll be waking up your neighbors from a mile away.

I had a 10 inch sub in my integra a while back, and although I'm just hammering the point in, I could rarely detect it while standing outside the car - especially at the volumes I generally ran it at. It was an inexpensive yet very worthwhile upgrade to the sound in the car - and contrary to what you believe, it was not a "high end" upgrade by any means. It was just a plain old Polk 10 inch inside a basic box running off of an average Kenwood amp - the whole package was less than $300.

Now, I agree with you that you can have the sound "good enough" without a sub, but your perception of a sub to wake up your neighbors is what I disagree with. I had new JL XR components installed in my car last year - and while waiting for my new amp to arrive - I had only the components hooked up - no sub. The JLs sounded awesome and I was surprised at how much bass they were able to produce - this would certainly have fallen in the "good enough" category - albeit the speakers themselves were about $300 at the time. When I had the sub wired up when my new amp arrived a few weeks later - there was just no comparison, however. Using the crossover on the amp - this only improved the performance of my JLs, in that they no longer had to reproduce the lows - although they did a fine job of doing so, the sub was much better suited for this purpose.

I hope you do decide to at least try out a sub or listen to one - just something as a simple boxed 10 inch, nothing fancy or expensive - can make an awesome difference and really bring out some things in your music that you didn't hear before. Most of the time the bass you hear from cars on the street comes from rap music - and not that I have a problem with rap music but it tends to have a lot of bass. I listen to a lot of techno, rock, and metal - and there tends to be less BOOM BOOM BOOM bass (with the exception of techno). I occasionally pull up some classical from the Baroque era (I like harpsichords) and you can tell there too.