Here is an interesting post on the Ascend forum. Granted, he says he likes the CBM-170SE's better, but it is a very nice review of the little Usher.
http://forum.ascendacoustics.com/showthread.php?p=24128#post24128
Thanks, interesting take. I've read all the professional reviews (and many from people in forums) I could find on the Usher's (and at least a few of all the other speakers I've listed) and one that impressed me was from Chris Martens of avguide.com. He compared them directly to the Epos els3 (one on my list) which seems to be highly regarded among professional reviewers as well.
What's funny is that he thinks the Usher's imaging, depth, and soundstage are very good. He talks about the "height" they reveal in a recording, something almost unheard of in this price range and hard for any speaker. I'm not sure if bad dynamics are the same as congestion, but he feels the 520's dynamics are excellent as well, unlike this poster. He also mentions that the Usher's need a lot of break in time, I wonder how long this guy played them before reviewing them?
Thanks for the link! Here's the review I mentioned if you are interested:
http://www.usheraudio.com/news/Poland-S520.pdf
(Ignore the poland thing, it's in English).
Here's a site with all sorts of reviews of Usher speakers and equipment in case anyone is interested (some are in foreign languages I can't read at least!) :
http://www.usheraudio.com/news1.htm
Also, here's a fairly recent review of them from this site by Tom Andry, in case you all didn't read it already

:
http://www.audioholics.com/reviews/speakers/bookshelf/usher-audio-s-520-bookshelf-speaker-review
He says of them: "As far as I’m concerned, these are THE budget bookshelf speakers to beat."
He also mentions that they are somewhat unforgiving of poor quality recorded music (which worries me a bit, as we all know rock is not the best recorded music, however a UK reviewer and magizine--hifi world uk--which picked it over many other bookshelfs said it was lively and dynamic and loved rock and pop) and maybe this is why the other guy thought they could be compressed sounding: he was listening to a badly recorded cd.
So many variables with speaker selection!
