I've been messing around with the different build options for libmad and have found that using --disable-debugging gives a noticable performance boost without compromising audio quality. If you build with --enable-speed its faster still, but this is not such a good idea on a piece of hifi kit.

I've noticed that both the rioplay and rrr source distributions include a larger (260k+) libmad.a which is what I get if debugging is switched on. The no-debug lib is approx 108k. I don't know whether the binary distributions are the same, but if so, changing them may speed things up a bit.

Cheers
Paul

Hmm... I'll look into this, but I definitely disabled debugging. Here's the command line I used to compile MAD:

./configure --host=arm-linux --enable-speed --enable-fpm=arm --disable-debugging

If I remember correctly, MAD wouldn't even play songs without skipping if debugging was turned on.

Maybe it's a version thing ... I'm building 0.14.2b.