I'm a bass player, and I play a five string. I'm also a huge fan of Genesis. So really DEEP, but not boomy, bass is really important to me. I made the switch to using a subwoofer way back in the 90's for all systems I have. The first truly amazing system I ever heard actually used bookshelf speakers the size of JBL L100's with a subwoofer. It was simply amazing on Edgar Winter's Frankenstein, and this was back in 1975. It was powered by a Phase Linear 700.

When you use a subwoofer, it really frees up the woofers in your main speakers to focus on everything else without those long throws. In fact, my amp has it's own shelving settings so I can sharply roll off the bass at the same frequency at which the sub comes in.

Edgar. :)

BTW, the speaker system was Cerwin Vega.