This is old.
ESD is old and busted. Don't use it anymore. New hotness: Pulseaudio.
The Enlightened Sound Daemon is the X server of audio. Clients connect to it and can interface with the audio hardware the same way that an X11 client such as Amarok can. Speaking of Amarok, ESD is a perfect match for it. I for one do not like the idea of having all my music and stats locked up on one machine. I wanted to play my good music at parties without having to install Amarok and a keyboard/mouse on my Xbox.
I should be able to use SSH to forward the X11 connection to my laptop, and forward it to Cosmo's ESD server. To do this, I use ssh pluto -X -R 16001:cosmo:16001 amarok. That sends Amarok's display to my laptop, while forwarding port 16001 (ESD's port) to cosmo. Prior to executing this, I ran esd -public -tcp -promiscuous on cosmo. That started the server and set it to accept all connections. Not secure, but I wasn't at a public function where everyone had access to my net. I configured Amarok's engine to use Xine's esd output plugin. Clicking play started the magic as the sweet tunes of nullsleep, R.E.M, Guns & Roses, and whatever the heck last.fm pulled up. My laptop, Callisto, was now acting as a router of sorts. All of Amarok's connections originated from Pluto. SSH intercepted them and sent them across the gap to me. Upon arrival, the ESD stream went to Cosmo, and X11 went to my display. For added security, I could use ssh -L 16001:localhost:16001 esd -tcp -bind localhost to securely connect to the ESD. I would have to use 'localhost' instead of 'cosmo' in the ssh line that runs Amarok though.