Tavener uses the sound of a deep gong to draw sharp lines of demarcation between the passages, and the entire recording is captured in what obviously is a highly reverberant acoustic space (after notes cease, reverberation tails seem to float in the air almost forever). 

For many loudspeakers, this much musical complexity captured in a resonant recording venue would be a recipe for sonic mush, but the Be-20 makes seeming child's play of disentangling the tightly interwoven instrumental voices and contributions of the recording space itself. In the faster-paced dance passages, for example, you can easily hear the distinct, skin-taut voices of the individual percussion instruments, or the bowing techniques applied to individual stringed instruments. In fact, the Be-20s offer an open invitation to relax and follow individual instrumental threads within the larger whole, just as one might do at a live concert. And when Tavener's gong is sounded, oh my, the Be-20s made my whole listening room light up with the instrument's spectacular attack and then resonate with its dark, extended, shimmering overtones. But the biggest revelation comes in hearing the Be-20s handle the slower, more beguiling string and chorus passages. There, the Be-20 lets you tap straight into the quintessential warmth of the gentle strings—something more analytical speakers tend not to do—while simultaneously showing you the reverent hush that falls over the hall as the chorus quietly begins to sigh.

We can learn several things about the Be-20 from its performance on the Tavener piece. First, it effortlessly delineates complicated, multi-layered sonic details, yet does so—and this is very important—without shining a searchlight on its own prodigious resolving powers. Second, it captures much of the "feel" of hearing live instruments at play. In string passages from Icons of Eros the speakers sharply contrast the incisive cut and thrust of rapid bowing and the slower blooming warmth of sustained notes. Similarly, the Be-20s vividly exposed the elastic "pop" of individual skin-taut drumheads being struck, the subliminal mouth-sounds heard as well-trained chorus members began to sing, and especially the majestic way that the sound of the large gong came alive and then gradually decayed within the reverberant space. Finally, the Ushers remove conventional "hi-fi" artifacts to such an extent that the listener simply falls headfirst into the music, following individual melodic or instrument lines at will, just as at live events.

What makes the Be-20 so good at conveying the elusive "feel" of real instruments? I think it has much to do with the way the speaker's timbral, temporal, and dynamic qualities work in perfect synchrony—never as disparate characteristics drawing attention to themselves in isolation. The result is that the Be-20s allow listeners to connect with performances—as much on emotional as cognitive levels— in deeper ways than is often possible with other top-tier speakers.

The Be-20 also offers two or three other musically significant characteristics I should mention, the first of which is unconstrained dynamics. To state this simply, let me say that the Be-20 sounds more dynamically open and uncompressed than just about anything I've heard, short of some of the great horn loudspeaker designs. For example, whenever I played familiar recordings and adjusted volume levels on soft passages, thinking I had made appropriate allowances for louder passages to follow, the Be-20s consistently surprised me by revealing the ensuing crescendos to be much more explosive and energetic than I had ever imagined. In short, if what the Be-20s are doing is right—and I think that it is—then an awful lot of the speakers I have heard have been guilty of compressing or quashing dynamics, at least to some degree.

An interesting example can be drawn from "Moten Swing" on Clark Terry's Chicago Sessions 1995-96 [Reference Recordings]. As the beautifully recorded song begins it initially seems to have quiet and subdued dynamics until, about 30 seconds in, a trumpet section simply erupts—snapping you to attention with its power and presence. The Ushers flat out nailed the swagger of that trumpet section coming to life in a way that, in my experience, leaves most other speaker systems sounding a bit mechanical and lifeless. Later, at 1:34 into the cut, the Ushers again surprised me by showing how the De Paul University Big Band suddenly and dramatically stepped up its energy level to make an emphatic musical point. Over time, the Ushers gradually condition listeners to expect much wider dynamic range from familiar recordings than they may ever have experienced before. With these speakers, you experience dynamic shifts not only as changes in volume, but as changes in physical sensation. You get the sense that you can both hear and feel the energy-level of the performers rise and fall, which is a revelation.

Next, I would draw attention to the Be-20's imaging and soundstaging, which are uniformly superb with great analog source material, though perhaps not quite as good with typical digital source material. When recordings are up to the task, the Ushers do a wonderfully holographic job of placing performers in precise locations onstage, and of revealing the overall size and acoustics of recording venues. The only catch, I found, is that the Be-20 is not particularly tolerant of recordings where mixing engineers have ham-fistedly pushed performers hard to the left- or right-hand sides of the soundstage. In such cases, the Be-20's normally three-dimensional presentation tends to collapse, at least to a degree. Good though the Be-20's spatial characteristics are, however, I suspect Usher could improve the speaker further still by eliminating sharp creases on the front baffle plate and giving the baffle more deeply and smoothly radiused surfaces (much as Revel has done with its new Salon2).

Finally, I must comment on the Be-20's bass, which is at once well-defined, deeply extended, and very powerful. Whether you find the Be-20's bass balance slightly too prominent or "just right" will, I think, be both a matter of taste and the size of your listening room. Understand that the Be-20 is voiced to sound well-balanced in larger rooms, even when playing what Jonathan Valin calls "power music" (think Mahler symphonies, high-energy rock, and the like). When used in inappropriately undersized spaces the Be-20's bass can and will overload rooms; for smaller spaces the Be-10, which is a down-sized, single-woofer version of the Be-20, would clearly be the better solution. I should also mention that, on a qualitative level the Be-20's low-frequency presentation is quite different from that of, say, speakers such as the Magico V3s. Based on my admittedly limited experience with the Magicos, I would say the V3s perhaps enjoy an edge in tautness and almost pluperfect critical bass damping, while the Ushers offer arguably deeper (and in some instances more realistic) reserves of mid-to-low bass energy and punch. Of course what one man hears as ideal bass, another might perceive as bass that is overblown.

To appreciate what the Be-20s can do down low that many other top-tier speakers cannot, try listening to the opening movement of the Abbado/Chicago performance of Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije Suite [Deutsche Grammophon, LP]. The movement begins quietly enough, but within about a minute reaches a point where loud concert bass drum "thwacks" signal a shift in mood. Now any top-tier speaker worthy of the term will produce a loud, low sound when those bass drum notes arrive. But what the Usher does is convey the sensation of massive bass wavefronts moving from the front of the hall to the rear like sonic tsunami waves—a sensation I find highly lifelike and compelling. It's the ability to reproduce those big, almost tactile low-frequency wavefronts that sets the Be-20 apart. Similarly, if you listen to rock or fusion jazz recordings that prominently feature bass guitars, you will again find the Be-20s faithfully capture the instruments' ability to momentarily pressurize rooms with bass energy—especially when slap-style bassists attack their strings with real vigor. I played the Be-20s for an accomplished electric bassist and he listened, plainly awestuck, and then commented that they were the only high-end speaker he had ever heard that could convincingly create the illusion of hearing real electric basses played in small club or theater settings. The bottom line is that if "power music" with meaningful bass content is part of your listening repertoire, the Be-20 (or Be-10) could be a great speaker for you.

Conclusion

Having lived with the Usher Be-20 for many months, and having heard many of its closest competitors (almost all of which fall in a higher, $20-30k per-pair price class), I feel confident in saying that the Be-20 offers terrific value for money, exhibiting two qualities most music lovers prize. The speakers retrieve sufficiently deep levels of musical information to fully engage our minds, while at the same time conveying the more vibrant, emotive, soulful elements of music in ways that will surely win our hearts. In short, the Be-20s are wonderful machines that foster deeper comprehension of music—in all its aspects.