CD Audio

If you're happy with CDs then there is absolutely no reason to change.  I was simply having a problem with the media itself and the space it occupies. 

I used 'whipper' (a Linux alternative to EAC) to rip my CDs - both do the same job.  You definitely do not need an 'audiophile' CD drive for this, I used a reasonably cheap USB drive as reading is usually performed in several passes (*). Once ripped, Whipper/EAC will connect to the the MusicBrainz database and append track information.  The next step is the crucial one; EAC will generate a checksum for each track and compare this against an online database of rips for the same track.  This will report back the number of people who have reported the same checksum so you can be confident you have an accurate rip.

For playback, a Raspberry Pi connected to a USB drive served me well for years.  I live in a small apartment and have no need for a NAS.  I recently upgraded to a SOtM SMS200 but can't say that it's a huge step up in performance over the Pi.

(*) In order to calculate the checksum accurately in a manner that can be compared with others, you will need to 'calibrate' the drive to determine the offset.  This usually involves nothing more than dropping a popular CD into the drive and drinking some tea while EAC rips the disk with various offset values and uses tries to match them with values in the online database.  You will only need to do this once for each CD drive you use.