If something is used for cinema, sound reinforcement, or "professional" use by a DJ, the focus seems to be getting it as loud as possible. To me that means everything else is sacrificed, including people's hearing, and the engineers should find other jobs.
TL;DR: A cinema experience isn't something to aspire to or look at for reference unless loudness is your primary goal and you're willing to sacrifice almost everything else for it.
Longer version:
For many people and cinemas though, more SPL is all they want/need, and the more they get, the more they need, and they enjoy living out that cycle.
I don't "need" sub-woofers that go deeper at home, many just like them, personally I like the idea of something being much better than a theater which is why I have a 77" OLED that I sit fairly close to after trying a few projectors, because the movie theater is focused on big and loud, and I want quality. Hopefully RGB laser projectors come down in cost or MicroLED TVs around 12" get priced reasonably in half a decade.
Concerning the last statement: Yes, if your goal is to sound like a (in my opinion horrible quality, IMAX or otherwise,) cinema, then don't worry about deep bass, just focus on turning the volume up and playing movies with bad people making bad choices for the dialogue like Tenet*, and you'll get the theater experience.
*I don't know how much is the fault of the IMAX calibration and theater, or if it was the mixing and mastering, or Nolan willfully pulling an Interstellar (which I love by the way) but Tenet has bad sound and the people involved should feel bad and release a corrected version when it comes out for consumers.
Have you ever been to a high end movie theater? The mids/treble sound quality is quite good in some cases, and the ability to deliver tactile sensation of impacts etc is better than most audiophile home theaters, I’d bet.
Don’t look down on people (calling them “bad people”) for wanting a more enjoyable home theater experience. You can look down on practices that may cause hearing damage, but none of
what is being discussed here risks that — we are talking about bass peaks, not chasing after mids/treble that cause instant hearing damage.
It is not about achieving maximum SPL (since you seem to have this impression) or playing movies at 115db LFE continuously — it’s about
meeting a standard specification for peak speaker SPL capability. This standard exists for a reason: to ensure that dynamic peaks intended by the movie creators are not compressed during playback. Compression is bad for sound quality, of course. In bass, not only does it reduce impact, but it corrupts the signal as it was intended by the artist. And, unlike the endless audiophile pursuit for the best sound quality, SPL is easily measurable, and for home theater there is one standard spec to meet — where once you’ve met that, you’re done.
Lastly, many may not realize that even some acoustic music tracks have large bass peaks. I could refer you to an orchestral piece with a bass drum hit whose impact (during realistic playback levels) probably pushes 110dB - 120dB, as is true to such drums in real life. It is not painfully loud, it doesn’t hurt the ears or risk any damage whatsoever. It is a large pulse of air, and reproducing it is just really hard — but when it is reproduced without compression, it sounds and feels amazingly immersive. Yet
most systems cannot reproduce this drum correctly. My Genelec 7350A subwoofer clipping indicator light will flash every time this track is played at realistic volume, for example.
Powerful, deep, impactful bass is hard. There is nothing wrong with sacrificing a little extension to achieve more impact, especially when you know bass peaks are being compressed otherwise.
