Its my understanding that the GPIO pins are not regulated, therefore 1) you will need a regulated power supply 2) no need to solder off the regulators for the onboard connector.
I think these mods/tweaks need to be cleaned up and consolidated into one coherent post.
Also I stumbled onto a pretty good thread from Archimago [he's known for measuring all things audio]. Anyways he measured a RPI and Odroid board along with a windows laptop and ended up with some pretty good settings which help to squeeze the most out of the RPi. I applied them and have to say, I really like what they bring to the table errr ears.
http://archimago.blogspot.com/2017/01/m ... s-usb.html
IMO, the settings he ended up with are a good starting point for what should be "STANDARD" settings for any RPi that is used for audio, no matter what software is being used.
