If it's your first venture, try to make it your only venture.
Spend plenty of time reading up, not only on monitors, but on placement, height, room acoustic treatment etc.
I know I'm only getting about 50% benefit from the mackies because my room isn't treated.
Many would (quite rightly) argue that there's little point having one without the other.
Hope that's been useful.
Steen - renowned for speaking words of wisdom
i was in a similar boat when setting up my home studio space. For ages i just mixed on headphones (i didn't have a space to have any kind of speakers), and then moved into a house with a little room and started using some old hi-fi speakers as monitors (which made a notable improvement in my mixes) and then started the hunt for proper monitor speakers at the end of last year to help improve my setup. Where i work we have a pair of Adam P22a's, a pair of Mackies (damn, i can never remember the model number. they're 6 inch drivers, from the early 2000's..... *shrugg*) and some older passive alesis boxes. the thing was, it gave me an idea of how they sound in
those spaces but little real idea of what they would sound like at home so i still felt
fairly clueless when looking. i spent the better half of 8 months in the end reading, listening, and trying every monitor i could think of/find under £400 and ended up with a pair of RCF Ayra 6's. out of the ones i tried (usual suspects; KRK Rokits, Yamaha HSM's, Behringer truths with the ribbon tweeters, Alesis, Mackie) and read stuff on they seemed the most revealing and natural sounding. Saying that, i did also spend £75 on desktop
speaker stands (mainly because foam speaker pads wouldn't get the monitors up to ear level, but boy howdy were the stands worth every penny!!!
) and have spent alot of time and effort prior to all of this treating my space.
I was pleasantly surprised by the Behring Truth 3031a's but went with the RCF's purely because they sounded more neutral to my ears.
As others have suggested, try/read as much as you can and, if you've not already, get your space sorted acoustically first so as to really make the most of whatever monitors you end up with.