frequency response - B&W vs. Monitor Audio

Two points: everyone is right, frequency response, in and of itself tells little about the "sound" of the speaker. Second, response above and below what we can "hear" influences out perception of the sound that is audible to us. I find that my subs make music sound more realistic even when there is supposedly no content present in the range they cover. The human perception system is fascinatingly complex and not yet completely understood. There was a recent experiment in which it appears that our sensitivity to ultra high frequency sound was not through our ears but through the body in some way. This sounds weird and it is but when the body was blocked from the sound and the ears left exposed the sound could not be perceived; when the ears were blocked and the body left exposed it could. As Haldane said'"The world is not stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine".

The lowest note on a standard piano is A1 @27.5hz, and if you double that to 55hz that is the next A up (A2), you IMHO
are missing a lot of musical sounds from below 50hz ie some low notes on a bass guitar,synths,organs etc and that last octave again IMHO is vitally important for depth, unless of course you only listen to the Triangle, Flute or solo Violin music.

The 'demo' disc that came with my sub has an organ track with a 16 2/3 hz pedal tone.
The Saint-Saens Symphony #3 with Organ is awesome.
It'll rattle everything in house. You can see the warble in window reflections.

I believe the Bosendorf Imperial Grand goes 1 octave below A1. This instrument has 97 keys, not 88.

Careful!

Magfan you are indeed correct, the Bosendorfer mental amount of $$$ Imperial (best piano on the world by a long stretch)goes down to C (additional 9 notes) to give a full 8 octaves, so A below A1 (if there was one) would have a Hz of 13.75 add a few (can't remember the multiplyer to give a semi-tone increase (been a long time since I was at musical instrument technology college), and it is still
rather lowdown Hz wise.I've only ever played on the Bosendorfer 7'+? model daily (way back), what an instrument that was! Having only tuned piano's (back in the day also) with the Standard A1 27.5hz(that is/was hard enough to do) the big fella must be a piano tuners nightmare all those additional notes in the bass, if you have a cold, forget it pack up your tuning crank, go home, you ain't gonna hear the 'beats' that low.

Thanks for all the posts, very interesting. My amp is a 15 year old Yamaha RX-485, I'm also running a 15 year old Yamaha CDP. I cannot decide if I want to upgrade the speakers or the electronics! Budget is about $1600.
No one has mentioned anything about high-passing the B&Ws, would that help? I'm afraid it would hurt the imaging of the sound, too much coming from the sub in the corner.
Even if I upgrade the speakers, I will still be missing that extra low-end oomph; I think I need a sub woofer.
I will probably purchase a <$1000 integrated and mate it with a sub woofer. The room is small, like 14x12x8. Possible combos include Cambridge Audio 650 + SVS PB10, or an NAD C326 with a Velodyne DEQ-10R. NAD to sub connections are quirky. The CA has A/B switching, so I can do a high-level connect to the sub.