When I was a kid, my older brother spent a few sweet years abusing a silver 1978 Subaru BRAT, and I spent a memorable portion of that time clinging for dear life in its little pickup bed, wedged into a rear-facing seat with pistol-grip armrests.

From a safety standpoint, the BRAT — that’s Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter — was the vehicular equivalent of Jarts. To me, it was horizontally opposed heaven. In high school, a favorite teacher of mine drove a red Subaru GL wagon; an ’83, maybe. It looked jaunty and adorable but sounded downright ornery, all rasp and rattle — in other words, exactly as it was supposed to sound. To me, those cars weren’t just Subarus, they were Subaru itself, and to this day the beautiful noise they made serves as a lingering definition of the brand.

Well, after a week and a few hundred supple miles behind the wheel of a 2010 Subaru Outback 3.6R, I think I’m going to need a new definition. This fourth-generation Outback is better in most every meaningful way than its predecessor (except, arguably, the way it looks), but it’s missing something: the noise. From the driver's seat, the new Outback is quiet — startlingly so, even as the tach needle swings toward the redline. Try as I may, I can't get the 3.6-liter flat six (enlarged from 3.0 liters) to rattle and vibrate like Subaru's H-engines of yore. It remains sweetly composed at all times, and delightfully flexible from idle to its 6000-rpm power peak.

Some criticism, eh? Truth told, the fourth-generation Outback is difficult to dislike. For one thing, it’s bigger than its predecessor and most of its rivals; its roof is a mere four-tenths of an inch lower than a Honda CR-V’s, but the Outback is more than ten inches longer overall than the Honda— with a good number of those extra inches residing behind the front seatbacks. I posed to the Outback the daunting child-seat question I ask of most test cars: How far does the front passenger seat have to slide forward to accommodate a rear-facing baby seat behind it? The answer here, to my surprise: It doesn’t.

Driving dynamics are engaging if not game-changing. The new Outback wallows a bit more in the curves than I expected, certainly more than last year’s model, but the all-wheel-drive system hangs on with its usual tenacity and the open-road ride is decidedly more supple than before. And that 3.6-liter engine, matched to a five-speed automatic, hides quite a fist within its velvet glove, and offers a marginally greater towing capacity (3000 pounds, against 2700 pounds for the Outback’s standard 2.5-liter four-cylinder engine).

My test car was the straight-up 3.6R model, the base version of the six-cylinder Outback. Its starting price, $28,690, is identical to the top-drawer four-cylinder Outback, the leather-lined 2.5i Limited. Equipped with an optional (and very fine) 440-watt Harman/Kardon audio system, my car came in at about $31,000, quite a reasonable sum, I’d say for this kind of interior space, power, all-weather ability – and quiet.