Can a set of Ls50 metas surpass or equal a set of Kef blade metas with subwoofers

No doubt the location of the powered bass drivers on Blade would be a plus and the high quality enclosure also a big plus so the whole Blade UniQ design seems quite unique and not emulated easily with separate sub enclosures instead. One of the few out there I would consider as challengers to Ohm CLS design. Metas have very good dispersion pattern and UniQ driver for coherency which is why I am a KEF fan as well as Ohm these days. But $35k? Ouch. Lots of quality engineering there but still ouch.

I love the blades...l think the LS50's give people a little taste of what there whole product line can do....amazing 

Yeah Blades are one of very few speakers in their price class that I would seriously consider owning. I love how KEF puts out extensive well written technical white papers to help explain and demonstrate (with metrics) how their products work and perform and how the design and technical innovation makes them unique. That’s the Engineer in me speaking.

The Blades do have a better UniQ driver, I forgot the exact difference and that was for the non-meta comparison. I have the old LS50. I consider the LS50 a 3/10 and the old Blades a 10/10. The old Blades are incredible.

A better comparison for the OP is the new LS60 (the baby Blade). That is likely still better than what the OP has.

My old LS50 + KC62 sub is good but I will be upgrading that. I am considering the following:

- Blade 2 Meta

- Reference 1 Meta

- LS60

-Yamaha NS5000

I expect all of the above to be a lot better than the LS50 (meta) + sub. I love to get the Blade 2 Meta but it looks like the NS5000 will win out due to placement issues.

Don’t discount the driver differences. 

The blades crossover from the woofers at 300hz based on measurements. Kef claims 350hz.

the sub will be fine at 80hz and down but there will most likely a sound power issue between the 80hz and 300hz crossovers if you ran the SL50 with subs. The big heavy drivers of subs don’t play really nice above 100hz. I am sure there are a few out there though.

At low level there might not be too much difference if your not critical but push the sound pressure and integration issues and distortion/compression will surely show it’s head

Personally I don’t care for subs with small speakers and I think they blend a lot better for critical music listening with larger speakers. Think of it as turning your large 3 way into a very large 4 way.