I have solved the issues with audio drop out when streaming AAC audio from my Windows XP box to my Linux box. There were a number of issues, none (to my knowledge) were caused by my DIR-825.
Problem 1: network-manager in Linux doesn't get on well with the ralink driver. Tons of IO_CTRL messages are output to the /var/log/messages file every couple of minutes, and at the same point the wireless link is dropped momentarily by my Linksys adapter.
Solution: install wicd (an alternative network manager) on my Linux box
Problem 2: Even with the above problem fixed, I still saw occasional (every 20 to 30mins) drop-out. Using Wireshark (network monitor/sniffer) I tracked it down to my XP box flushing the ARP table. I read that in XP the default is for Windows to flush the ARP table if the network doesn't respond for 3 mins.
Using Wireshark I could see that there were pauses in the network traffic for three seconds, but could not discover the reason why. As far as I could tell, for every REQ there was an ACK and the packets looked ok. It is as if the audio streaming on my Linux box stops requesting data across the wireless network for a awhile as it already has enough data in it's bufffer. This is just a guess - I don't really know what is causing it.
Solution: set up wicd on my linux box to run a script which pings my XP box every 2 seconds.
Now, what would be a nicer fix would be to somehow stop my Windows box flushing the ARP table ('static' table?). I don't know enough about this ARP flushing stuff to tackle this unfortunately.
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Topic: DIR-825 with Linksys WUSB600N-CA V2 - slow speed in 5Ghz N mode (Read 20410 times)