Active Speakers: The usual suspects ....

Or you could go with single driver speaker with no x-over and a conventional 2 channel amp.

For your application I'd recommend Klein & Hummel actives. ATC seems a bit over the top -- but great products nonetheless. BTW, the K&H above is wearing the ATC midrange driver.
K&H xover is digital so you feed it a digital signal direct & use its DAC. This is very important if you want to benefit from a dsp's delay facility (why else would you use a digital xover??? It sucks:))

The atc is analogue. So is Mr Linkwitz' Orion, one of the best (the best?) mid-sized active speakers. On the down side, the Orion is very complex.

I have owned/used the Focal Twin6 Be, PMC TB2+ (powered by Bel Canto, McIntosh, Carver, etc.), JBL LSR6328P, Klein + Hummel O300D, some others. All running in a Realtraps treated room.

I would pick the O300 easily as the top choice from that batch -- but -- their dynamics are restricted by builtin limiters, and they will start to trigger at around 86 dB. And activate full time and start to change the response above 92-93 dB or so. Just FYI in case you are running high levels. Some say adding the sub will help that situation, I did not try them that way.

Second place goes to the JBL. A nice pleasing sound, a bit full in the upper bass (sounds like JBLs), a slightly relaxed tweeter. Very rugged and extremely powerful, can really play loud. But keeps good balance at lower levels. The midrange is not as detailed as I wanted, kind of blended. But usable speakers for sure.

PMC... I owned 5 of the TB2+ for a few years, ok for the money at the time compared to the relatively awful Dynaudio BM15 I had been using. But overall the TB2 were very bright and sometimes thumpy, too much smiley-face flavoring to suit me over the long run.

Focal Twin6 -- did not work for me at all, especially in direct comparison to the other models I had available. Heavy upper bass/low midrange, distant treble. I do not like bright speakers and wanted to like these, but they sounded cloudy. The imaging was not to my tastes either, in two different rooms.

But I also extensively compared all these (both listening and recording studio mixing/mastering for several weeks) to the passive Digital Phase EP-SM1 and Zu Druids (with upgraded capacitor) running Bel Canto eVo amps and Zu Libtec cables.... no contest. Those passive setups were by far my top selection for clarity, dynamics, imaging, tonal balance, and especially three dimensional depth. You name it, they had it. The Digital Phase tweeter is phenomenal, as is the proprietary bass resonance design. Easy 35 Hz response from a 2-way bookshelf.

I have no experience with them, but Digital Phase does make their own amps and can fix you up with a mounted 'activated' version if you don't want to chase amps and cables.

Steve

these are supposedly the cat's meow in pro studios:

www.barefootsounds.com

i want to check out a pair myself!

Yeah the MM27 is king of meter bridge monitors for sure - in the tight accurate deep bass department.

A substantial heavy bookshelf sized monitor but with the kind of quality bass at SPL's you normally only get from large 100 liter+ big box cabinets. They are competely void of that typical muddy ported bass sound that you get from almost all ported two way monitors with impressive bass extension.

Barefoot are critcially damped Q=0.71. The subwoofer is actually a SEALED box. You are talking very high quality bass here in a small package. Of course SPL will still be limited/constrained by Hoffman's Law (efficiency of a woofer system is directly proportional to its cabinet volume and the cube of its cutoff frequency) but it is King of anything that size for sure!

IMHO, the raves are justified as there is really nothing like it in the monitor size of speaker unless you add a high sealed quality subwoofer. I think I have heard them called "near-field monitors on steroids". Great choice if you like totally realistic drums.