Resistance down, Audiodeluxe had it for me at $168 bucks. Sold....

I watched Izotope's 22 minute video tutorial on using the Tonal Balance Control w/ Ozone 8, etc. and it impressed me greatly. This was part of my decision, plus the upgrade price fell into an affordable (O)zone for me.
 

Mesh
I have O7 Advanced and it's fantastic for both mixing/mastering. Besides Tonal Balance and Mix Assistant, would there be any other compelling reason to upgrade?
 
Would love to hear from you guys that upgraded from O7A to O8A.... 

Hi Mesh, not used it in anger yet. to be honest if you were just doing the O7A to O8A upgrade then there are a few little niceties if you use reference tracks to compare and there is a new low latency IRC and a new spectral shaper plugin (the others are updated to include a 7.5ips tape emulation on top of the current 15 and 30)
The master assistant is OK for getting a starting point (probably won't use it much as I have a fairly set way of working with Ozone) some other niceties for the metering but if you have bx meter you could just use that.
 
Tonal balance to my mind is just another take on reference matching but useful.
 
Neutron 2 Advanced is probably the most exciting thing out of the two.

I Posted this on another site and thought I might share it here as well.
 
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I have to admit I'm a sucker for plugins that claim to do very cool things for your mix. But, beware, and use your ears.

Pop sort of alluded to this in an early thread. Most of us have been dabbling in mixing music for a long time. Either in your recordings or maybe even mixing a live band. Over the years you would hope that we have developed some mix chops.

So, I bought Izotope's channel mix plugin Neutron 2. It is actually a pretty cool plugin that includes a feature that will analyze a specific track and set the eq, comp, gain etc. I applied it to one of my guitar lead tracks about a month ago and, at the time, thought it did a pretty good job.

Fast forward to last night. I was about to record another lead and I was searching my Kemper profiles for just the right sound. I picked one of my favorites and tweaked to "perfection." I then recorded a short piece of lead after which I added Neutron 2 to that channel and let it work it's magic. The thing is, after an hour of setting different Neutron 2 options, I couldn't find any setting that made the track sound "better." Then I went back to the earlier lead and switched Neutron 2 off and realized the track sounded better without it.

Here's the thing, I have spent countless hours tone chasing for the perfect guitar tones over the years and have settled in on what I like. Why on earth would I now apply a plugin that would analyze my "perfect" tone and modify it to someone else's idea of what that tone should be.

Neutron 2 maybe just the ticket for instruments that are not recorded very well in the first place or instruments that you have not spent a great deal of time tweaking over the years, but I doubt it will make an instrument that you have spent your whole life perfecting sound "better."

As pop stated...use your ears!

Mesh
I have O7 Advanced and it's fantastic for both mixing/mastering. Besides Tonal Balance and Mix Assistant, would there be any other compelling reason to upgrade?
 
Would love to hear from you guys that upgraded from O7A to O8A.... 

I recommend setting aside time to dedicate to the demo. The Mastering Assistant is nice, but you also need to see its limitations to understand it (it uses a defined chain each time and overwrites anything you already have in place unless I missed a way to use it otherwise). The visual mixer (N2) is nice since it includes a plugin to tap into any track's fader, pan, etc. That allows for very quick placement of tracks both visually and acoustically and removes a lot of the overhead of playing with faders, pan pots, etc. on the console.
 
Best way to get use of the demo is look at the new features and try them out on mixes you have done (prep a fairly complex one by saving as a new project and stripping the plugins from it, then redo with O8N2). Other's opinions are good, but the one that matters has to be your own.

Thanks guys.....will definitely demo it first.

I was thinking of getting Ozone 8 anyway so the current deals available on the N2O8 bundle proved a no brainer.
 
Early days but I'm really liking Neutron2 especially the eq masking feature.

todays the last day for the special upgrade prices, I am on the fence for the crossgrade from my music production bundle to the new one for $199, I guess I better pull the trigger or get of the pot

I made the leap to O8A.  That's all I could afford (really can't afford that)
and it's a worthy upgrade.  The EQ's in O8A work and interact with the 
"Tone Shaper" the same way Neutron 2 does, so that's a bonus.

by the way is it just me or does the setting to hide related VST2 plugins not work with Izotope?
I have two of everything in the plugin list and have had to manually exclude.
Unfortunately the Izotope installation doesn't offer the choice as to what version to install