[interim followup, I haven't had a lot of time for this].

Java Jive said:
On Thu, 23 Jun 2016 08:28:04 -0500, Richard Robinson

Wifi-wise, the pi is the bottleneck, with 'iwconfig wlan0' giving "Bit
Rate=54 Mb/s" (the rest of the system could go faster).

That sounds like it's telling you the theoretical maximum rate for
802.11g rather than the actual rate being achieved:
802.11b 2.4GHz 11 Mb/s
802.11g 2.4GHz 54 Mb/s
802.11n 2.4GHz 320 Mb/s

I suspected that. Then I shuffled stuff around the network for a while to
make sure it had enough reality to chew on then looked again, and it told
me, variously, 180Mb/s and 216Mb/s. So I think it's real numbers - which I
also don't understand, the card only claiming to be capable of up to
150Mb/s. I have v. little experience of network diagnostics.


But handwavingly, this is ~5megabytes/sec, CD-quality sound is
~10megabytes/min, so I'd have expected that to be plenty.

5MB/s is approximately equal to 54Mb/s (bytes vs bits), so, even if you
are being told the actual rate being achieved, you could easily be maxing
it out.

That's what I don't see, 5 megabytes / second is much faster than 10
megabytes / minute. Bob Latham's comment on buffering may be the answer,
I'll investigate that when my tuits arrive. But not being in an energetic
mood today, I think I'll also look at Volumio.

--
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem

My email address is at http://www.qualmograph.org.uk/contact.html