Performance

Playing Red book audio is playing 16 bit PCM audio at 44.1 kHz.

This is 705600 bit/s or 0.67 Mbit/s.

We have stereo so 1.34 Mbit/s.

A WiFi network (802.11 G) has a bruto throughput of 53 Mbit/s.

In practice there is some overhead but we can safely conclude that playing or streaming audio is not very demanding. You don't need huge processor capacity or much bandwidth.

In fact any MP3 player proves this point.