Full Answer
Owners want contradictory things - louder tone, no drone, calm cold starts, aggression on demand - so the honest answer involves choosing a compromise. But the compromise is more predictable than it sounds, and the two things that decide whether you keep an exhaust are both knowable before you buy.
**Drone** is a low-frequency resonance that builds at a specific engine speed, and on the VB it lands squarely in the highway cruise range. It is not experienced as loudness so much as pressure that builds over a long drive. What controls it is resonators and muffler design, not diameter or material. Resonated and muffled systems carry an extra chamber tuned to cancel those frequencies, give up very little at full throttle, and transform the car at cruise. Straight-through and muffler-delete systems remove that chamber and are consistently described as the loudest on cold start and the most likely to drone.
The buying mistake is judging from the wrong footage. Manufacturers film cold-start revving and full-throttle pulls from outside the car. Nobody posts twenty minutes of sixth-gear cruise from the driver's seat, because that footage sells nothing - and it is exactly the footage that would tell you whether you can live with the system. If you cannot find in-car footage at 70 to 80 mph for a system you are considering, treat that as information.
**Cold start** catches out more owners than drone does, because drone only affects you. The FA24 is loud on a cold morning in completely stock form - Subaru runs an aggressive warm-up strategy that raises idle and pushes heat into the catalyst to meet emissions targets quickly, so the car announces itself for roughly the first minute. An aftermarket exhaust amplifies that, in the worst possible context: early, cold, stationary, where every neighbour can identify your car. There is no fix. No tune meaningfully changes warm-up strategy.
So the practical decision rule. Long highway commute, or early starts in dense housing? Resonated or muffled, or an axle-back for the mildest change. Short trips on back roads? You have far more freedom, and a single-exit conversion is worth considering on this platform specifically - the factory dual-exit layout can produce a raspy edge at part throttle that single-exit systems clean up.
And one honest note: no exhaust behind the catalytic converter makes meaningful power on a stock-turbo VB. Buy for sound. If you want exhaust power, that is a J-pipe, and it requires a tune.
Last updated 3/26/2026
