Why buy cheap speakers??

I am in the Speakers first camp too, Most electronics at High End level are good enough if you have really good speakers and source (TT, transport).
Cheapy speakers with limited bass are very easy to get right, bass is where the difficult part starts and really where music starts, even a female voice with excellent bass sounds much better and rich, with beautiful dynamics...

Now a speaker with no bass can sound very detailed.
A badly designed bass section will block and kill all detail and music mudding everything up.
This is why it is so hard to add a subwoofer!
But when Bass is clean and effortless and supports all other frequencies properly, you are in heaven!

IMHO Bass equals Horsepower sound-wise!

I have listened to a lot of systems with terrible bass sections that where really boring, when a good bass section is implemented it is hard to stop listening to music.

I too have an Isolation transformer and recommend it fully!

It would be terrible to get an excellent pair of speakers after you spent a fortune on electronics just to find out you made a couple of bad choices along the way and never noticed it...