When I'm uploading, I can hear whether or not it's a fast one. I get noise from my display card appearing on my (on-mobo) mixer, too quiet to hear when I'm playing the empeg through it, but I can just detect the percentage meter changing. Maximum throughput occurs when a track is long enough that the per-track overhead is small, but not so long that transfer is stalled when it gets ahead of disk access. I'm assuming that's what we're waiting for; half a second or so at a time. I assuming it's the writing on the empeg that's the issue, rather than reading (I'm reading from a local Reiser FS). Of course, normal network traffic is also an issue, as I hinted in my earlier post.