For High quality stereo playback in MpegDec, you want a 40MHz '040 - which means an 840AV, a Radius Rocket or another machine with a Quad Doubler upgrade. Possibly an overclocked 660AV.
I doubt that transfers of 128kps MP3s over a 10Mb/s LAN should be a problem, as long as you're using a switch and not simply a hub.
The ideal setup would be a Compact or Pizza with 16 bit 44KHz audio out, and a remote, powerful machine streaming strait AIFF 16 bit audio over the LAN to the player Mac. You could do other formats apart from MP3 then, and/or VBR and higher bitrates.
Another possibility involving much more hacking - both soft- and hardware - would be piping the raw MP3 data out of the Mac to an MP3 decoder chip and analog-to-digital converters. Or building a complete MP3 player kit with its own storage (flash or HD) and just using the Mac as a GUI front end over a serial connection.
I doubt that transfers of 128kps MP3s over a 10Mb/s LAN should be a problem, as long as you're using a switch and not simply a hub.
The ideal setup would be a Compact or Pizza with 16 bit 44KHz audio out, and a remote, powerful machine streaming strait AIFF 16 bit audio over the LAN to the player Mac. You could do other formats apart from MP3 then, and/or VBR and higher bitrates.
Another possibility involving much more hacking - both soft- and hardware - would be piping the raw MP3 data out of the Mac to an MP3 decoder chip and analog-to-digital converters. Or building a complete MP3 player kit with its own storage (flash or HD) and just using the Mac as a GUI front end over a serial connection.