As far as upping the bass at lower volumes, it just starts sounding muddy to me. I think the real solution will be to get some quieter tires and go at the interior with some dynomat and acoustic foam to kill the road noise. The rumble in my G35x seems worse than in my Firehawk that has hi-performance 275/40-17s all around!

Personally I think Apple is doing a huge disservice by taking all the kids money when they purchase an iPod so that they are stuck with those annoying earbuds and EQ settings that show patterns on a freq response graph that only make sense to an asylum inmate.

04NismoV35 touches on it and you hit it more squarely -- people are "trained" to what a "good" system sounds like over a number of years. Almost every manufacturer, store and show emphasizes the booming bass and screeching treble to show how their system can handle the extremes, all the while killing any warmth to the sound (I hear little "music" there )

What's a kid to do when he drops a few thousand dollars into a car in order to impress his friends? He cranks the treble and bass up so it sounds like all those demo systems his friends have heard. You can read the same thing in a few threads in this forum -- friends not impressed because the bass didn't go boom.

We should quit trying to impress anyone (all parties mentioned above *cough*), and just enjoy the music.

I'll take a bit back -- with the iPod (and originally the Sony Walkman I guess) we now have the concept of individual sound that isn't broadcasted, but still find ourselves cranking the bass and treble into new realms of boom and sibilance. I'll avoid the MP3 and compression debate in general, but give us some decent earbuds, or have Shure drop the prices of those sweet, sweet E3 canal phones so that our kids don't go deaf and dumb! (Dumb as in how sound should really "sound").