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I'd get the Chromecast and crack on.. I have a Chromecast stuck into some active speakers in the kitchen and it all does the job..
Sound quality IMHO is dependent on the mastering supplied to Spotify rather than bit rates. The recent masters of 'classic rock' generally sound a bit shit...
Classical recordings are generally OK.. BBC Sounds is similar.. Radio 3 sounds great, the rest of the stations are shit..
It does do playlists and it can / does work as NAS.
I've got bits and pieces of music on drives/cloud/iTunes which I can move onto it.
It's just time innit.
What motivates me musically is finding stuff like I listen to. Or finding new stuff "organically".