I haven't used the 970HD, but I have used the 981HD and the 980H. The 981HD was on par with my Yamaha S1500 for DVD-A and actually a touch better on SACD, and I think the 980H improves a bit on the 981HD for both. The 981HD has the more powerful scaling solution, but on my display (a 32" CRT HDTV) the difference was only really apparent with some messy source material that caused combing for an earlier version of the 980H's firmware (haven't tried the production firmware yet, waiting on a final hardware sample) but was flawless on the 981HD.