when it becomes available, will i be able to install it, demo it, and if necessary uninstall it without impacting my current sonar install? (i did ask this on a couple of other threads but wasn't answered)
tia!

it's a mystery!

I thought that the monthly plan eliminated the need for a demo? You just pay for a full featured version and rent it for as long as you need to make up your mind. 
Demo's always have to have certain features missing so to avoid piracy. 
 
The new method makes demoing super easy for everyone. 
And it will not cause problems with older versions. 
When you upgrade it always imports your preferences etc. 
As example I upgraded to Professional and my version of X3 Studio is unchanged in all aspects. 
I can open projects in either version with absolutely no visible difference other then the new mix recall icon in the tool bar. 

i'm actually considering buying a month, as it's currently the only way to get the demo... however, my question is more about uninstalling it - will uninstalling the demo impact my current installed version? i suspect that yes it will, as i've asked the same question a couple if times the last week and it's been studiously ignored by all the regular posters

Uninstalling any newer version of SONAR will remove all the shared utilities used by all versions of Cakewalk DAWs. Demos are no different, they too use shared utilities. In the past this has worked to the benefit of users of older versions of SONAR. They could install the demo and take advantage of bug fixes in the shared utilities because only the SONAR.exe is time limited. The shared utilities are the full retail versions.

i think i feel  feature request coming on

scook
Uninstalling any newer version of SONAR will remove all the shared utilities used by all versions of Cakewalk DAWs.

So you can't demo 2015 and decide it's not worth it without destroying your previous version.
Kind of defeats the purpose of a demo, at least for existing users. 
 
Was this made clear when previous demo versions were downloaded ?
 

pwalpwal
i'm actually considering buying a month, as it's currently the only way to get the demo... however, my question is more about uninstalling it - will uninstalling the demo impact my current installed version? i suspect that yes it will, as i've asked the same question a couple if times the last week and it's been studiously ignored by all the regular posters

Not uninstalling it will be a small price to pay for all the goodies you'll get to keep, like AD2 Producer to name the most obvious.

Uninstalling a demo or any newer version will leave behind any updates to shared components - such as VST scanner etc. However that's not necessary a bad thing since there have been numerous fixes there.
 
If you want an absolutely clean uninstall to revert to the prior components there is no way other than using your backup software to take a snapshot, or manually backing up and restoring any shared files. It shouldn't be too hard to do.
 
In the latest version however we allow rollback to prior versions from Command center.