Opinions and recommendations on active loudspeakers

All good recommendations, above.  Now for something completely different:

You should probably go listen to a pair of Meridian speakers.  Everyone thinks of them for home theater but they can sound very, very good for music.  One of the best 2-channel rigs I ever heard was a Meridian 3-channel system for music.  I listened to a recording of Van Cliburn's Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 and it was sublime.  Absolutely the closest reproduction I have ever heard to a real concert hall.

The best part is that there is a ton of used Meridian stuff out there for sale.  Meridian gear tends to be well cared for and there is a healthy dealer network.

@lp2cd 
I expect the Quested to have much better control of low freq. than the Boulder. The two 8" woofers in the Boulder moves exceptionally fast at low freq. and in my opinion tend to lose some control, lots of air. The Quested you can hardly see move at all. Like a big ATC. The Boulder has an interesting flat mid from Elac with their Jet 5 ribbon mounted inside. So very different setup. Both have heavy amplification. "Small" monsters!

Besides PSI 17 maybe the smallest Neumann KH80 would be really good for very near-field usage at a much lower cost. My recommendation is for anyone interested in actives to try a Neumann monitor. 

I think the major reason for active has not been said yet: linear phase.  You can adjust the phase of each driver electrically, before the amps and within the electronic crossover, where this is impossible with a passive crossover.  All the loss in passive crossover+ cable is another issue (lots and lots of copper) and then the not so small issue of changes to crossover behavior as voice coil temp increases.  

And our pro division would take issue that pros don't care about sound.  We know a mix engineer that spends two days getting the snare drum sound exactly right. Or another engineer who uses different converters on every song to match the artist vision of how that song should "sound".  There are people who don't care but it's rare anymore since the artists are funding most records.  

Brad  

then the not so small issue of changes to crossover behavior as voice coil temp increases.  

All the best and most expensive speakers still use them. It can't be that bad. 

"It can’t be that bad. "
Well it is and it is worse than that. All of the audiophile speaker designers know that removing the crossover elements from intervening between the amp output and the speaker drivers, and performing the division of the frequency spectrum within the amplification stage, is a much better way of performing these functions.
They don’t do it mostly because of resistance from the buying public.
That is also the reason why in the realm where the quality of the music potentially means your reputation and career and income, ie the recording industry, active speakers are the overwhelming choice. Active speakers are more dependable at all volume levels.

None of the above relates to cheap and nasty active. There is a quality level in active speakers also, but the best ecelon is as dependable a speaker as one could hope for. Dependable in the manner of being able to rely that the speaker is telling the truth about the musical selection being heard via the speaker.
Studio monitoring is not about ’liking the sound’. It is about hearing the good the bad and the ugly. No jokes about the movie sounstrack. A person evaluating a recording during the production of that recording doesn’t want a rose coloured view of the proceedings. They want to hear as precisely as possible the effect of any and all manipulations they are making to the signal. Anything which interferes with how accurately the producers or final master assessors are able to accurately assess leads them to be releasing mixes which are subpar compared to what can be done on accurate monitors.
The audiophile buying public are under the impression that they will get better results from using their choice of amp on passive speakers. That is not the case. The recording industry is mostly all using active speakers because they give a higher quality result than the same speaker in passive form.
There is a mountain of literature about the benefiits of getting rid of intevening passive crossovers. You should do some investigation.