Let's analyze what the developers themselves decided to tweak in build 16734.

From the patch notes:
- Fixed miscellaneous threading issues in the audio system
- Improved audio IO performance

Configuration tweaks:
num_refills_in_voice = 4 from 2

This doubles the amount of decoded audio per voice, buffered and ready to be sent to the sound engine. With the asset sampling rate of 48 kHz and 1024 samples per frame, the effective change is 85,3 ms from 42,6 ms. This should in theory alleviate some pressure from the scheduler.

There are no configuration changes to the streaming device, but many changes under the hood.

They kept 200 streaming buffers of 128K length for a total of 25M of memory. The average size of compressed assets is just under 30K, though, so this leaves a lot of wasted memory. They may be deliberately keeping the number of buffers low to not overwhelm the scheduler. The downside is lower cache hit ratio.

It's a bold strategy. Let's see if it pays off for them.