Second bump from the dead on this.
Its been hard to find a 24/96 or better USB-i2s adapter, so I've been looking at the new empirical audio Off-ramp. The Off-ramp 3 is no longer based on the M-audio Transit, appears to now be native drivers for 24/96 USB, includes the i2s, AES, and coaxial by default, and is $699 now unless you opt for the superclock 4 upgrade. That seems a lot better then the sick $1200 price from two years ago for the previous iteration.
Granted, he still charges horrendous amounts of dough for cables and such and is certainly greedy for my money, I'm still tempted to put it on a possible to buy list in the future. For now, it seems worth my time to modify a Transit myself to get straight spdif without the optical cable involved and place it inside my DAC instead of using $630 more dollars that my current equipment doesn't warrant. It doesn't seem quite right to pay that much for an upgrade from 16 bit or strongly worry about jitter, surely someone thought of something better... I bet I should probably just buy a new CD transport that outputs even higher resolution and formats for the dough.