which monitor isn't lacking in the bass dept.?

Quad 12LS

You might want to consider a pair of Dave Ellis 1801 monitors with cabinets made by Jim Salk (www.salksound.com). Absolutely gorgeous cabinets in custom wood with award winning driver design. Add a Vandersteen or VBT sub later on to pick up the lower frequencies.

I'll chime in on the Totem Mani-2s being great for bass as well as just about everything else. Amazing speaker. I really didn't want to spend the $$ on them, but be advised you can get them used for around $2K. I'm not fond of spending that much cash buying used so I "settled" for the ACI Sapphire 25th Anniversary Edition which gives about 80-90% of the performance for 1/3 of the cost.

The ACI Sapphires low freqs are one of its many strong points as far as I'm concerned. It reaches down fairly deep but not earth-shatteringly so. It's a rather large monitor at 35 lbs [Scan Speak tweeter, Vifa 7" woofer]. One of the great values in audio today as far as I'm concerned [you can only buy them direct from ACI for $1300]. An even better deal is if you can get ACI to sell you the Jaguar as a monitor-only pair as they did for years and years. IIRC they sold at around $2300 or so, but now only seem to come with hefty low frequency modules at a price of $7000 (yikes!).

I have not heard the Quad 12Ls unfortunately, but I do own the 11Ls. Good but not great in the bass department, it really sings in the mids. The 12Ls have a larger woofer and supposedly richer bass. The Quad 11Ls are perfect for a small apartment or office.

I use Spendor S3/1p (6.5" 2way) for my HT system specifically because they're much more efficient and have far superior bass to the otherwise fine S3 or LS3/5a...also mate perfectly with the spendor SC3 center speaker, which is basically a double-woofered S3. Too bad Spendor's discontinued it, as turned sideways it's a helluva monitor too...both it and the /1p are like S3s on steroids.