The LFE causes confusion sometimes. It was originally developed to carry very sub-bass cinematic sound effects down to maybe 30 Hz, e.g. thunder, explosions, impacts etc on their own channel. Thus film theatres could control the volume of these effects to suit the particular cinema's acoustic environment and sound reproduction system. In the original cinema theatre* implementation, the LFE was a separate channel fed to one or more subwoofers. Home replay systems may not have a separate subwoofer. Modern home surround decoders often include bass management to allow bass on any channel (main or LFE) to be fed only to the loudspeakers that can handle low-frequency signals. The point is that the LFE channel is not the "subwoofer channel"; there may be no subwoofer and, if there is, it may be handling a good deal more than effects.
*That's how we spell it here.
