I hope I don’t jinx it, but I might have found a less than obvious solution. My WiFi network is great: I spent quite a bit of time optimizing it for working from home, very little interference from neighbours, etc. It just works. Volumio & Tidal have been working great as well. Then something changed and Volumio became totally unreliable with all the symptoms in this thread. Seemed to be a Tidal app or Volumio problem, but I don’t think Tidal would let a zillion Tidal Connect customers suffer for long, so that seemed an unlikely source. Which leaves Volumio. Well, and the Pi of course.
A little digging revealed (seemingly unrelated) problems with the Pi’s 2.4 GHz WiFi, which reminded me that while updating my access point firmware the 2.4 GHz radio got switched on when I normally have it disabled as I don’t need it. So I disabled the access point’s 2.4 GHz radio again to force the Pi onto 5 GHz and… everything seems stable again! At least vastly different than the recent weeks.
So maybe the Pi under Volumio still has 2.4 GHz radio problems (the issue I read about was interference with the HDMI port, which isn’t used, but led me down this path). Not everyone will be able to turn of 2.4 GHz at their AP, so unless a system update can resolve the radio problem, a settings switch to turn off the Pi’s 2.4 GHz might be the solution. In most cases 5 GHz will be more stable, plenty strong enough, and once everything is set up, I don’t think there will be any roaming problems 