For many practical reasons, active monitors are what one will find in many project and mastering studios. Pro monitors are not designed for or marketed to the retail trade; beautiful woodwork and WAF are not a concern and marketing costs are kept minimal. Thus they have a rather narrow and utilitarian focus on sound quality and high value for the money. What one gets with an active pro monitor is a speaker that is no nonsense with a built-in amp engineered specifically for that speaker, along with sundry, often useful, options to EQ, balance and adapt their sound to the studio environment, be it near-field, mid-field or free-standing far field. Do keep in mind that active studio monitors often, but not always, accept only balanced (XLR) signal connectors, and that they also require an IEC power cord.
Because they are not commonly retailed (some cheap ones can be found at Guitar Center stores, but...), it is often difficult to directly audition and comparison shop studio monitors. Instead, Gearslutz
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/ , as mentioned, has endless, and extremely detailed, discussions by pro and semi-pro sound studio people comparing all of the various brands. One can spend days...
In my studio, I worked with Focal CMS 65 monitors for a few years. Well built and designed, good sound and an excellent value @ $800 each (studio monitors are almost always sold individually). However, they make everything sound "nice," and I needed a monitor that was more detailed and precisely revealing. For me, that has been Swiss-built PSI Audio A21-M active monitors.
http://www.zenproaudio.com/psi-audio-a21-m They are phenomenal; read the reviews. Absolutely flat, neutral, "fast," and utterly coherent and transparent, they "disappear" sonicly even in near-field and give me the sense that I'm listening directly to the source. They're analytical in the best sense of the word and not aggressive or fatiguing in the slightest. Carefully paired (wonderfully well) with my Focal CMS SUB
http://www.zenproaudio.com/focal-cms-sub , the system is essentially flat to about 30 Hz. The downside? Not so good for background music; they're hard to ignore. See what they have to say about them at Gearslutz. The entire PSI line is remarkable and similar. There may be other monitors as good, but none at a comparable price that are notably better. (ZenPro is a joy to deal with as well.)
So if you want to simplify your system, and hear something similar to what the mastering engineer heard, get yourself a pair (or more) of pro monitors.