Yeah it’s hard, for a lot of reasons - both limitations of the transducers and acoustic complexities of the room. I can’t stand thumpy / thwacky bass that sounds disjointed from the music - which is really easy to do, even with high end gear. I also can't stand soft bass or anemic response. And I use vinyl as a source, which can become difficult with too much LF energy. So my compromise is the 15" dual-concentric Tannoys I’ve got which roll off well before 20Hz, but have just enough extension to make "most" recordings sound musically whole.
A great set of headphones is a good tool that will reveal roughly how the bass "should" sound in relation to the music. Especially well-driven Stax. It won’t be as visceral or satisfying as decent reproduction on a 2ch, but it will tell you if you’re way off. Like headphones, the Tannoys do a great job of sounding coherent from top to bottom.
Also I think a lot of audiophiles fall into the trap of buying bookshelf / monitor models from a higher line so they can afford the better drivers (etc), or for size constraints (WAF), and then have to deal with the lack of bass or the headaches of integrating subwoofers. Which makes them fixate more on bass as a separate entity, which is a path to audiophile hell.
