Reading through the full thread and I think it is great so far. A couple things made me want to comment.

I believe that the mp3 quality conversations, while interesting, are very soon to become outdated. The storage capacity of current and future portable audio devices will be large enough to allow one to use lossless formats. An 80GB(current iPod) would hold at least 5000 lossless songs. And this is 80GBs now. In a year this will seem like nothing. So throw off your mp3 shackles and start ripping everything in a lossless format and organizing it in iTunes. I don't own an iPod YET. I am waiting until I have all my music in iTunes and orgainized. I figure the price will drop by the time I am done and it will be a reward.

Plus you can make cumulative backups to DVD with iTunes.

As for connections from iPod to receiver I would recommend researching cables that use the line out from the apple connector straight to RCA cables. I have read that the wiring in the iPod dock is sketchy and of poor quality. Doing it this way you do lose the charging ability though.

I do have a question for the people using USB cables from PC to 990 or 2150. Does the USB cable act as a line out. Is it being processed by your sound cards? I don't really understand the function of this setup so I would appreciate any knowledge.