Steve Simon suggested the problem was timesync. He seems to have been very correct in this suggestion. Though I wonder why it needs to do > 60k syscalls :\.
Additionally, using dd to play my cd instead of cat seems to work pretty well. dd -if a000 -of /dev/audio -bs 4192 seems to be enough. Additionally, using madplay like: madplay -o RAW:'02 - Birdhouse In Your Soul.mp3' | dd -of /dev/audio -bs 4192 seems to work well. --dho
