[LAU] death by ogg vorbis

strange problem ... looking for clues. we have a slimdevices/logitech media server, and have had for more than a decade. we have 2 or 3 playout devices, one class and two "receivers". the system has worked solidly for a very long time. about a month ago, i download some awesome new London jazz from a project named Yuseef Kamal, as FLAC from Bandcamp. Sadly the project has since broken up, but "Black Focus" is phenomenal. As I usually do with FLAC or WAV downloads, I stash these files outside our music repository, convert to a lossy compressed format and then move the result into the music repository to keep the space down when we copy the whole thing to an SD card or whatever. The compressed format is generally always Ogg/Vorbis. So I did the same. Played the result on my main working computer (one version of the repo), and on my laptop (another rsync'ed copy of the repo). Entirely expectedly, it works normally. But then, after a lot of head scratching, I realized that whenever I try to play any of these files via the slimdevices/logitech server+devices, it does something to the server and/or the devices that requires a complete reset of the entire system. Switching to other music will not work - things are dead, even though they are superficially alive. I have never seen this behaviour from any other music/files. I can play the same files via some other media app on the computer where the server runs, and there are no problems. I've repeated this "experiment" at least 4 times so far. Playing a single track from the Yuseef Kamal album effectively crashes my logitech/squeezebox system (though the server is still responsive and the controller(s) still appear to do stuff. I've tried looking a debug logs fromthe server, but have seen nothing to indicate what is happening. I even reconverted from the original FLAC files, and tried those instead. No difference in the behavior. I have a few thoughts about things to try, but wanted to see if anyone else had any suggestions on approaches to the problem, things to look for, etc.