My streaming machines all have Pulse Audio disabled since it is an unnecessary extra layer of complication.
I presume the reboot issues you are having relate to increasing the size of the kernel asound prealloc buffer?
If so, I solved that problem by having a small script executed at startup as follows:

#!/bin/sh
PCM_ID="/proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/sub0/prealloc"
LOGFILE="/home/username/prealloc.status"
BUFSIZE="1024"

if [ -f $LOGFILE ]; then
        rm $LOGFILE
fi

# Adjust playback buffer
if [ -f $PCM_ID ]; then
        echo "Success: $PCM_ID ($BUFSIZE)" > $LOGFILE
        echo $BUFSIZE > $PCM_ID
else
        echo "Failure: $PCM_ID ($BUFSIZE)" > $LOGFILE
fi

Obviously you are going to need to edit the LOGFILE destination, but I find it works pretty well when called from /etc/rc.local