I’ve just found this thread, so I know it’s been a while since the last reply, but there’s a large audio store nearby where I live that hosts three completely acoustically treated rooms, with the largest one hosting the high-end speakers. They had the non-meta R11’s right next to the Reference 5’s.
I auditioned them a few months ago, side-by-side, and upon listening to them in a complete A/B test on the same Denon amplifier, it was almost laughable how little difference it made. It was so small, in fact, that my wife and I looked at each later a few times whenever he switched, simply shocked at how little difference there was sonically. There WAS a difference, however, but just so unimportant that I would barely be able to tell them apart. The biggest difference was the 4x more expensive price, which instantly made us decide to go for the R11’s without any doubt (the Reference finish was black-glossy with the dirt-ugly brass drivers… ugh).
The dealer himself admitted it was criminal how similar both were, and he was slightly concerned that KEF was undercutting their top speakers so many times since their release. It’s literally just a question of whether you can’t stand having Chinese-produced elements in the speakers or not.
Curious to test them sometime in the near-future to compare them against the meta versions instead. I expect almost no real difference, but I could be wrong.