Thanks to the many people who responded to my question.  The short
answer was "sox", which I somehow missed the in package collection.

What I'm going is:

	cdd -t N `pwd`
	sox -s -w -c 2 -r 44100 -t cdr track-NN.cda track-NN.wav
	bladeenc -128 -QUIT track-NN.wav

all built from pkgsrc/audio.  I don't think all the sox switches are
necessary, but it works for me...  Some people have said use 192kBit
or 256kBit, but the player I've got can't keep up with that yet :-(

A bit of hunting around showed another encoder call "lame", but using
this encoder resulted in a really loud "pop" in the right channel about
20 seconds before the end of my test track - "Song 2" from Blur.

Thanks to all again,
Simon.