Exactly, once you experience visceral bass, you only then get to experience what it's like in real life to hear/feel the subsonic shaking of your body. Most people can hear down to 16hz which is a popular bottom note in pipe organs (yeah I know that there are more prominent overtones at 32 and 64hz to make up the sound you hear). Movie tracks contain lots of subsonic information. Trains,bombs, helicopters (they have large output at 7-8hz), as you have likely felt in a low fly over. If your small subwoofer rolls off its output below 20hz (like 90% of them do to protect the driver ), then you will miss the subsonic information. The sole purpose of the HT is to recreate the actual event, and why you pay lots of money to go see a huge screen that fills your peripheral vision, with large multiple speakers to the effect you could convince a blind man that the actual sounds are taking place in the room.
The old saying "Contentment is destroyed by comparison " applies here. Once you experience an IMAX THEATRE and then go home and watch it on your 32" tv and your Wal Mart stereo, your previous contentment is gone. Same with living somewhere that you never saw a rocket in your life that had a bigger motor than a C launch, then someone comes to town and lets you experience life with a P motor . From then on, your reference level is changed.
