I initially suspected that the CPU might not be up to decoding the MP3s, but after thinking about it for a little bit I realised that no, that can't be the case. After overclocking it by 33Mhz (not much I know, but it's fanless and dangerously easy to do) and seeing no real performance difference I decided to whack in a PCI sound card and see what happened. I had a CMI8737 based card sitting on my desk with a slightly dodgy output jack, popped it in and booted into the BIOS to disable onboard.
Annoyingly however, the larger RAM slot is in the way, so to put the card in place I had to remove my second stick of RAM... I'll post pictures soon so you can see what I mean. In my final project I expect to use a PCI riser of some sort to fix that. Perhaps something link this:
Anyway, after swapping audio to the PCI card rather than onboard, the sound is fantastic. xmms2 is playing audio without skipping a beat. top says it's using 70-80% of the CPU doing it, but that's fine.
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