Anybody try one? How does it sound? Is it buggy??

yes i tried one....
but only turned some knobs and checked out the features in a bad presentation room with bad monitoring, so i cannot tell you how it really sounds...
but what i heard was very impressive i have to say!

on the right side there was a analog neve sidecar, with some 1073dpd (or dpa) and the 8051 compressor. mmmmmm analog yeah heh

i did a sweep with the eq on some channels,really heavy boosting and couldn´t hear any distortion or bad sounding,this must have been the best digital eq i used before, no comparison to plug ins!
this console gives you so much options for surround, routings and automation, i have never seen something like that before, maybe other digital consoles can do this too but this was the first "big" digital console i touched( i don´t count the icon system cause this is really just a controller).
there is so much headroom,what ever you do, it won´t clip, distort or anything and you have more tracks than you´ll probably ever need.

the guy from neve who was showing us the console was a very honest and cool person and really wanted us to play around with the faders and knobs even if he knew that no one in the room probably ever can afford it. lol

we asked him of course if the digital recreated neve eqs sound like the real thing and he replied honest with no!
he said they are close but it is really hard to program eqs to sound like the well known analog eqs from them.
i think i didn´t try the compressors...can´t remember those really

oh and the bugs?
the neve guy told us, what ever happens, if you disconnect the power or the console hangs up, all you have to do is restart and you´ll find the exact settings on the console again as before.....
now guess what happened 15 minutes later after he proudly told us this?
somehow all freezed and he had to restart.
he kept telling us about this great feature during the restart and when all was loaded, all the settings were gone!
you should have seen his face,it was priceless hahah

i hope they fixed this now!

the 88d is really expensive i have to say and for that price i would get definitely something analog....
but for complete digital based productions like movies and surround or anything it´s just the right thing i guess. (ok, these days nearly everything is digital, so you could use it for everything)

wasn´t the last matrix movie mixed on this console?i don´t remember exactly.

cheers

ps. sorry for my bad english