The mp3 benchmarking lie?
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Let's write a few notes about benchmarking the different mp3 decoders,
which are available. 'top' is NOT a benchmark, it's a simple check
how a program performs. The sad thing with 'top' is, that it has some
problems with the measurement of threaded programs of programs only
requesting short chunks of processor time. So, the only real test is
probably decoding a stream without threads with 100% CPU time and
measure the time how long your machine needs for it.
You can do this with mpg123 by doing a
  time mpg123 -t mp3stream.mp3
or
  time mpg123 -s mp3stream.mp3  > /dev/null
if you additionally want to measure the I/O time. 

If you find a player, which claims to be 10 or even more times faster than the
current players: just don't believe it. A factor of 2 MAY BE possible.

