Tricky to measure distance, but wireless access point is upstairs at one end of the 5 bedroom house, Rio is downstairs at other end of the house. MP3's are VBR at highest rate available with LAME / Audiograber. When I first start up a playlist I get some dropout for a few ( 15 ) seconds but then things settle down and work just fine. I assumed its the 80gig IDE drive spinning up when its first accessed.