How the music is stored is important. As 73Bruin points out, lossless solutions like FLAC, lossless WMA, and Apple lossless are going to be pretty well equal to a CD as far as the quality of source material. Once you have the files ripped, there are a lot of different ways to play those files back, and some ways will sound better than others. The Western Digital device is cheap and simple, and with an optical digital output it should allow you to lean on another device in the signal path (the 970 in your case) to handle D/A conversion. As far as I can tell, you'll need to move the USB drive between the WD player and your computer to add music. That could be avoidable by using a USB-equipped NAS device ("network-attached storage" - hard drive with a network interface) that you can access from your computer over your network without unhooking the USB. It can also be avoidable by using a network-compatible device such as the Squeezebox, AppleTV, or a number of other options. In that case, though, you need a network connection to the equipment rack (either wired or wireless) and a storage source that's always available (either an always-on PC or a NAS device). I've done a bit of tinkering with this using an older AppleTV as well as the DLNA (digital living network alliance) support in my BDP-83 and BDP-93 players, but I haven't migrated to it in any significant fashion.