Quick feedback on my above post. I received a response from iZotope yesterday (next day turnaround from customer service!), and they agreed there was an "internal processing error" and that any "Advanced" version of Ozone or RX met the criteria for the "Music Production Bundle 2" package.
 
I am tracking these two threads with interest now because of the CPU issues noted, but will not have the trial until later today. Based on what I have seen thus far, the "Neutron Advanced" version now makes more sense due to the masking feature alone. Since the plugin does cross talk to other instances, it is elevated to the same concerns that Ozone was previously,, i.e., you cannot simply slap Ozone onto every track and hope that your CPU will survive. The masking use only requires the EQ module, not the "whole shebang."
 
I am also interested in mid/side separation, which it appears Neutron lacks; so would require the Ozone EQ module to achieve, yet would not be reflected in the "Masking" portion of Neutron anyway. My concern is that this driving both Neutron Advanced and Ozone Advanced, yet still loses visibility on the end result.

Doesn't the non-advanced Neutron also have the masking feature?

yes i believe so
 
https://www.izotope.com/en/products/mix/neutron/comparison.html

Maarkr
read quite a bit from people on KVR:  http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=470703
 
sounds interesting to say the least.  They said they have had issues with Studio One, so my immediate concern is if someone has this running on SPLAT without issues.  Some also mentioned CPU usage, but some said they had no issue with it.  Special pricing is good till end of Oct so there's time to decide if I really need to add to my 400+ plugs?

 
i grabbed mpb2 upgrade and have been checking out neutron advanced sound and performance wise, have had no issues in studio one thus far, eight instances and all is good, haven't tried the masking or track assistant in s1 as yet.
 
in sonar with the same test project all is fine until i put the 8th instance on the master bus, at that time the rice bubble brothers, snap, crackle and pop make an appearance, the performance meters are all good only showing about 30%, and i can put another instance of na in without issue, as long as it's not on the master bus. tried the track assistant out in sonar, seems to work fine, quite interesting and perhaps useful, comes up with some good results. not tried masking yet.
 
performance doesn't seem to be nearly as bad as one would expect from some of the comments made here and elsewhere, not for me anyway.
 
all testing done with buffers at 128

The Grim
in sonar with the same test project all is fine until i put the 8th instance on the master bus, at that time the rice bubble brothers, snap, crackle and pop make an appearance, the performance meters are all good only showing about 30%, and i can put another instance of na in without issue, as long as it's not on the master bus. tried the track assistant out in sonar, seems to work fine, quite interesting and perhaps useful, comes up with some good results....

Are you on 2016.09 Platinum?  You can try two things.  1) enabling plugin load balancing to see if that helps eek out more instances on the master bus.  2) switch the performance meters from audio thread to system CPU.  Right click the module, cpu modes.  That will let you see if anything is impacting the load either in SONAR or outside of it.  When checking performance and the materialization of the Kellogg creations, it's good to make sure there's not a system load causing it.  The new meter modes make it easy to spot this.  Various background activities can affect results.
 
Keith

yes the latest, yes load balancing is turned on, and yes i've done that with the meters it shows all good. i did put the master bus instance on while the transport was running, and have read in the past that that could cause issues with sonar. i usually use studio one and it doesn't seem to care, i do it all the time. i'll check again next time i fire up sonar see if that may have caused an issue.

oh, and on the load balancing, that is quite magnificent, i noticed things seemed improved after trying the previous release, have messed around a little more with this latest release and it is quite an improvement.
 
now just give me an arranger track, scratch pads, multi instruments, extended fx chains and oh yeah something like s1's mix engine fx/console shapper, not just a plug that sits on top of everything, but the kind of thing that is deep in the audio/summing engine like mix engine fx (sounds awesome, especially on guitar sims ) and i might come back
 
there's more, but that will do for starters

it's all good, works fine now with an instance on the master bus, i went back and checked things, rechecked the meters while the 'kellogg creations materialized' the meters were fine, i then noticed something which made me realized that maybe i do need to wear glasses like people keep telling me when they see me struggling to read fine print, or holding things at arms length so i can read them, that is all i am going to say

A few updates on my previous issues with Neutron in the September version of SONAR Platinum:
 
1) I think I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but the suggested workaround of using the VST3 version of Neutron, rather than the VST2 version (which I was actually using by accident anyway since SONAR seems to no longer be hiding the VST2 versions of plugins that have VST3 versions, and the default categorization of Neutron in the VST3 scheme resulted in its being "relatively hidden" on my system -- it put it in EQs, and I have a bazillion of those, whereas my first inclination was to look in channel strips, then multiband dynamics, and dynamics, and ... -- I did actually look in EQs, but missed it somehow, maybe just thinking I'd seen the standalone EQ modules from it), got rid of the loud blip then cutting out of the audio engine until after restarting SONAR.
 
2) The crashing of SONAR when I loaded a project that had Neutron in it appears to have been a problem in MusicLab's RealGuitar2 VST that was somehow catalyzed by Neutron's being in the save project.  I replaced both instances of RealGuitar2 in the project with VST3 versions of RealGuitar 3, and the same project no longer crashed with Neutron saved in it.  (The project was from 2010-2011, so had a number of older versions of plug-ins in it compared to what would be loaded if starting the same project today. Part of my effort to remix what was there and add to it a bit would have been updating plug-ins anyway.)
 
3) After getting Neutron to work, I've tried it in at least 5 tracks in the project (thus far -- 2 acoustic guitar parts, a distorted electric guitar part, submixed drums, and a synth), simply using the Track Assistant to detect settings, with no other plug-ins on those tracks except for the Pro Channel Console Emulator and PSP Audioware's VintageWarmer 2 (for tape emulation).  There are still 3 more tracks in the existing project that just have their original processing on them for now (lead vocal, piano, and bass guitar), and I'll eventually try all of those with Neutron as I update other plug-ins on the two instrument tracks, but I will say that Neutron has at least done a passable job of making what is there thus far fit together (and I haven't used the masking facility yet).  It also detected the right track types with the exception of the synth (it just used Clean for that).  It's impossible to say at this point whether I'll end up using all of the Neutron instances in a final mix, whether I'll augment it if I do, etc.  However, I would say that, if I needed to just do a quick mix, be it for a demo or due to some really short deadline, I don't think I'd hesitate toward using what it's given me thus far.
 
4) I had noticed the other night that I was getting some "CPU stumbling"-type effects in the audio with Neutron in there, but I've had issues in that area with some other heavy duty plug-ins, despite having a pretty powerful system. Today I tried SONAR's new plug-in load balancing, and things really evened out (instead of what I'd typically seen before, which was the first of 12 CPU graphs being high while the rest were pretty low, despite having multi-processing engine enabled).  I haven't noticed any artifacts since then, with the single exception of there being a point when Track Assistant is running where it glitches each time.  I think that is probably when it puts its processing chain together, which may be a "natural glitch" point due to adding/reordering processors.
 
Overall, I'm pretty encouraged.
 
Rick

Welp...I'm glad i didn't let my initial impression of Neutrino stop me from viewing most of the YouTube reviews and downloading and demoing this great piece of kit. It is tres useful and sounds wonderful. Purchased.