If you are lucky enough to own a luxury sport utility vehicle, you might have chosen the BMW X5. Families enjoy the comfort, power and safety that comes equipped in every X5. Its all-wheel drive system can take you wherever you need to go in whatever road conditions the weather dishes up. No matter where you drive, be it to school to drop the kids off, shopping, or on long road trips, one feature of your X5 that is sure to get a lot of use is your car's outstanding audio system. An important part of that stereo system is the BMW subwoofer. An X5 subwoofer can make your digital audio files shine.

Speakers consist of several component parts, including the various drivers and crossovers contained in some type of speaker enclosure. There are usually three types of drivers involved, tweeters to pick up the high register frequencies that produce high-pitched sounds, woofers to take on the low frequencies and their resultant low-pitched sounds, and midrange drivers that excel in delivering all of the sound produced by the midrange signals. Crossovers divide the entire electronic signal recorded on your mp3 or CD into narrower frequencies to which the drivers have been designed to respond, so that you will be able to hear the full range of sound that is on the recorded media.

Subwoofers are drivers whose specialty is to deliver the low end of the sound scale, the bass and sub-bass sounds. You attach a subwoofer to your speaker to improve the low bass's resolution. Some of these sounds are so low that the human ear cannot hear them, but nevertheless humans can actually feel those sounds. You might have noticed this effect the last time you attended a live rock concert with a bassist performing.

These dynamic subwoofers are often installed in the back seat area or trunk of a car, such as your BMW X5. Care needs to be taken when turning the volume up when subwoofers are in action in your vehicle, because hearing loss can result from prolonged exposure at too high a volume.

Some people go for adding tactile transducers to their vehicles as well. When the low bass sounds go down so low that you cannot hear them, you can feel them, and that feeling is sensitized by the use of tactile transducers. They are connected to the seat in the car and the amplifier in the speaker. The sound coming from the driver is carried through the bones of your body and eventually up to your ears.

If you like rock music with a pounding bass line, or classical music that features tympani, then a subwoofer might be in your car stereo's future.