I used the R3 Meta for a short time. It's a easy speaker to live with. It does do well in close boundaries. Pluggable back port to switch up how it sounds depending on your front wall distance. One of the few speakers I used in my wonky living room digital set up without needing some type of DSP or PEQ. The directivity & coaxial driver make it perfect for most rooms. I feel like it's a safe speaker to buy. It sounded good with all genres of music for me. Didn't seem picky about amplification types. You can go into an adjacent open room & still hear a pretty balanced sound. I found a subwoofer to be necessary for my tastes.
So while there was inherently nothing wrong with it I didn't keep it long. I bought mine on a cheap open box deal & it was not hard to get back almost what I paid for it. Like one of the posters in this thread mentioned I moved onto & enjoy a Fritz speaker. I have not listened to the Special 40 so unfortunately I'm no help there. $1400 is a better than average price. Killer price but yours has that little imperfection.
If your normal range of speaker prices is $1 to $2k I think you will consider the KEF a pretty dang good speaker. For some reason I can't remember if it had "sparkle" . It just seemed well balanced in my room..no extra emphasis in any area of the FR.