If, on the other hand, your music is important, nay, essential to your driving enjoyment, then you need a subwoofer.

Right. I'll take a moment to make this point again (I'm sure I've said it before, but it certainly bears repeating):

Some feel that the car is a poor place to spend your prime audio dollar. Why sink a lot of money into making your car system sound good? The car is a terrible listening environment, due to things like road noise and the acoustic limitations of car interiors.

To that, I answer with the following points:

- I spend a lot of time in my car. During that time, there is nothing to do other than operate the vehicle. Listening to music is the perfect pastime in the car, it's basically the only thing I can do safely while driving. So I listen to a lot of music in the car.

- When I'm not driving, I'm busy doing other things. Rarely do I have the opportunity to listen intently to music except when I'm driving. If I listen to music at home or in the office, it's usually just background music because I can't concentrate on the music very well while I'm doing other home-type things. And I can't make myself sit down on the couch and close my eyes to listen to music. Even when I have the time to do it, it never works. I'm always interrupted, or I think of something else I need to do, or whatever. So the car is a much better environment for me in terms of being able to actually hear the music.

- When I am alone in my car, as long as I have the windows rolled up, I can listen to it as loud as I like without disturbing anyone else.

- The car interior might have limitations to its acoustic properties, but those limitations are well-known and you can work around them. A decent car system can easily outdo most home systems in terms of audio quality.

That's why I go to the trouble of doing things like buying empegs and installing subwoofers. Music is an important part of my life, and having the best possible car audio is a critical component of that.

To re-iterate Doug's point: I totally understand people who say that they don't care about how good their car stereo sounds. This is a perfectly valid point of view. But for me, it would be unthinkable to drive every day without having a car audio system that wasn't up to my standards.