I would like to drive a H-Bridge gate driver of a class D amplifier with a PWM/PDM signal/channel with ESP8266. Due to the 160 Mhz the ESP8266 can be a decent modulator for a D Class amp.
But, I don't see how this chip can handle a 320 kbps data rate, the best receive speeds I found on the internet are 20 kb/s IN THE BEST CASE with UDP and that's still only 160 kbps. Most of the times however the receive speed will be about 10 kb/s or even lower. If we optimize the TCP stack we could get a constant 15-20 kb/s for 160 kbps streaming and that's more than enough for most people, but still suboptimal compared to only a little more expensive chips.
Also I don't think that MP3 streaming or decoding with MAD is any good, the Opus codec would be a MUCH MUCH better option than MAD because opus supports variable bitrates and multiple channels while MAD supports only 1 channel. An MP3 to Opus service is a simple nodejs/python server with ffmpeg and libopus.
If one could implement an opus codec decoder for ESP8266 this little thing would become way more awesome even with 128-160 kbps. Those who need higher bitrates are pretty much f.-ed by the low Rx speed unless buffering is acceptable so there is no reason to buy an expensive DAC module to use with this chip.
https://www.opus-codec.org