For that size room the Ascend 340's might be a bit more than you "need" but who the hell cares about that? ;^) The 340's and 170's are among those speakers we at SVS have immense respect for. We have and can continue to recommend them to anyone for whom their size/price and styling seems to fit their needs. They are great speakers. I've personally told David Fabrikant that we'd be quite pleased to simply have entry level speakers that deserve to be in the same room with his products.
These do, albeit in a smaller form factor and less expensive package. Dollar for dollar we'll put our new 5.1 package up against anything in the world, but given the excellent CBM-170's are somewhat larger and more expensive than our speakers (a bit over $700 for a 5.0 package with HTM-200 as a center, whereas our 5.0 system is $549 during its intro... a fairly substantial difference in this price point) frankly we don't consider them to be head to head competitors.
Subwoofers are a different issue of course. We do consider the PB10-ISD to be in a class of one when it comes to anything remotely close to its price point and you get that with our 5.1 system of course.
If you are not that price sensitive, moving up to a $1,500 price point will get you a GREAT system from Ascend (where you could add an SVS sub by ordering from us, or getting a package from PlasmaDocs). Of course if $999 (or for now $899) is the top of your game, I believe you would have a tough time finding anything as good, much less better.
While I may now be partial to SVS speakers, you won't find me disparaging the Ascends. David Fabrikant knows what the hell he is doing (but then again, so do we).