The existence of the beta test is public information, but everyone in it has had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
I'm told that those data chips can be retrofitted to existing capsules without requiring complete disassembly; I don't know if the specifics of that procedure have been settled yet, though. In any event if you know the difference in sensitivity between your capsules, you can set the gain of the amplifiers accordingly. That doesn't depend on any chips; it's standard AES42 interface capability. Still, the chip approach is cool especially if you're running many microphones at the same time, e.g. for a multi-miked orchestra recording.
jerryfreak, what digital microphones generally aim to do is convert while adding the least possible amount of noise. With the CMD 42 the noise floor (on a dB SPL-equivalent basis) is about 1 dB greater than the same capsule would have with a CMC 1 or CMC 6. You would almost certainly lose more than that in any external preamp and A/D converter unless they happened to be optimized damn near perfectly for one another, for the noise floor of that microphone (which varies by capsule type), and for the maximum signal levels in that recording situation. That mostly never happens in the real world, so the digital mike would normally win by some amount--not necessarily a large amount, of course, since it's rare that the dynamic range of a modern condenser microphone is fully exploited in any one recording situation. Still, I wish I'd had a pair of these when I was recording percussion ensembles in the 1980s.
--The CMD 42's noise floor is audibly lower than the CMD 2's. You're right that the CMD 2 supported AES42 mode 1 only; the receiving interface has to convert the sampling rates if multiple mode-1 microphones are used simultaneously. But the CMD 42 also handles mode 2, in which the receiving interface uses control signals to nudge each microphone to a common sampling rate. No asynchronous conversion is required that way--thus saving a further dB or two of noise, in the rare event that the sound source is quiet enough to expose the microphone's noise floor.
And agreed, with industry-wide support for AES42 being almost certainly less than its initiators had hoped, Schoeps' investment in this project is a remarkable choice. But it's the kind of thing that can happen far more readily in a small, independent, privately-owned company than in a branch of a conglomerate that's responsible to a board of directors.
--best regards