Could you say what the format and bitrate is for this audio? I get static, because without an initialization, my sblive will play audio at "Unsigned 8 bit, Rate 8000 Hz, Mono".
After grepping around a bit through the alsa source for my sound card, I found a section that says the default sample rate is 44100 for dsp (dsp_spos_scb_lib.c). However, playing around with aplay, as others have suggested,-r 8000 produces identical output to piping to dsp on this machine.