Although I'm afraid to kick start the flamewar, I have to admit I have been in various cars with subwoofers and not seen an improvement in sound quality over my sub-less install. In fact in general I have seen a huge degradation in quality.

I am more than prepared to believe that this is down to the particular configuration in these cars, but am a little confused by how a subwoofer really helps in a car.

At home, definitely - it fills in the sound gap at the bottom end, and just makes the sound bigger, but in the car road noise covers that frequency range, so you need to turn it up too high to make a difference and then it just hurts. Easier just to ignore the very low end of the frequency range.

What I tend to do is have the volume set up in my car so I can hear the songs above my own singing and it all seems fine. And that is just with stock Impreza speakers, which are pretty basic.

I would like to be convinced that a subwoofer will be worth the loss of space in the boot, but experience has shown me otherwise. So far.