Creative I know is on the HF boards and Asus has been competing with Creative for quite some time.  They both claim their cards as being more audiophile centric but also for gaming as well.  Do I think that they care about jitter or low noise?  More than likely not on the level JCAT or SoTM do but I think we should add them and who knows maybe the results will shock everyone (not likely but here's a vodka on the rocks in hopes it does).

"Claim" is the operative word there. I've certainly got no problem with them being in the group, any device with a coaxial digital output is a worthwhile data point. All I can say is that from my own experience, if a standard Realtek motherboard digital output grades an "F," consumer level soundcard digital outputs would range from "D-" to "D+."

I am super interested in how the Asus Essence STX II does. It uses TCXO and has coax out, so it could be legit.

WTF, one of the dudes in that thread is talking about linear supplies for his HDDs. That has to be stupidly complicated.

Nope, on the contrary.
Simply unplug the power connection to the HD and insert a cable coming from a linear power supply.

Whether or not that will 'help' anything I leave up to others.

make sure to use a linear powered CD rip with that JCAT USB card 

I always wondered if any switching power supply noise, noise from a ground plane or RFI traveling down a usb cable could end up modulated in a data file.
 

Nope, on the contrary.
Simply unplug the power connection to the HD and insert a cable coming from a linear power supply.

Whether or not that will 'help' anything I leave up to others.

I wonder if folks will start using jitterbugs on their HDD USB ports.

I took the approach of sending the data over ethernet but I suspect the router may have it's own noise issues similar to a drive.

Ideally you'd want to have whatever music is in your playlist completely in ram during playback. If there's no data coming from the hdd while music is playing, there should be no need for a LPS for it.

Unless your player does not load an entire playlist.  What about any power or ground plane noise traveling along the USB ground to the computer, would that go away while the drive sleeps?

I always wondered if any switching power supply noise, noise from a ground plane or RFI traveling down a usb cable could end up modulated in a data file.

It won't 'stored' be in the DATA FILE for sure beacuse it can't, there is no mechanism for it.
Bits in a file are just a representation of '1' not 0.8563 or 1.1375 (fictional numbers used for illustration) as a file ONLY knows '1' or '0' (so not 0.2654 + some time offset or whatever).
There is NO timing info stored in a file other than a byte which says what the data-rate is.

This does NOT mean that the analog waveform that is reproduced by a converter cannot have amplitude or timing issues nor that 'digital or analog' noise cannot make it in the analog signal.
That is NOT in any way related to the DATA FILE but is caused by limits and variations occuring by physical properties of certain components in 'the chain'.