Hello. I'm baffled and looking for help.

I've been trying to play audio over my home wifi :- the backend is a
raspbery pi sending audio out via USB into a DAC, the frontend is a laptop
running Debian 8, sending to a pulseaudio "SMC9514 hub digital stereo
(IEC958) on pi@raspberypi" sink (I find pulseaudio deeply obscure and
offputting, but I haven't found much else that offers the possibility of
doing this at all). This connects, to the extent of getting a noise out of
the speakers, but the sound is useless - broken up, stuttering, as much
silence than sound - it gives the impression that the data's just not being
sent fast enough.

Wifi-wise, the pi is the bottleneck, with 'iwconfig wlan0' giving "Bit
Rate=54 Mb/s" (the rest of the system could go faster). But handwavingly,
this is ~5megabytes/sec, CD-quality sound is ~10megabytes/min, so I'd have
expected that to be plenty.

(I've tried wav and a highly-compressed mp3, doesn't seem to make much
difference, I'm guessing it's decompressed before sending ? But it wouldn't
help anyway, having a DAC and cheap storage I don't want to use a lossy
format).

So what am I missing ? Is there some deep reason why this won't work, am I
doing something stupid, what's going on ?

TIA.

--
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