I'm using DLNA to play music from my laptop it at the moment (pulseaudio sink, opus encoded) to a raspberry pi (gmediastreamer) that uses pulseaudio to upmix to

I'm using DLNA to play music from my laptop it at the moment (pulseaudio sink, opus encoded) to a raspberry pi (gmediastreamer) that uses pulseaudio to upmix to 5.1 and play on a usb soundcard. It works, and the quality is good, but the lag is crap and I had to wrap everything in crappy scripts that would fix everything if it died. It's been in place for a year but I'd love to ditch it.