Does anyone know what causes "cutting out" while playing to multiple speakers with Airplay?

[conn]

I've tried to make the best of my "new" system since December but it's just not reliable... I'm not sure of which device is to blame (Airplay, WiiM, Audio Pro) and it's very well possible that my home is just to complicated for this type of setup and I'll have to completely go back to Sonos.

I have about 8+ speakers which consists of 3 Audio pro WiiM editions (and one AP non WiiM), one WiiM Pro Plus with some Audio Engine Speakers, a JBL 300 and some Sonos speakers. All speakers have a good wifi connection per their signal strength reporting yet I still get random cutting/dropouts from just about every speaker.

I have a busy household with about 70+ devices connect to wifi (when everyone is home) consisting of multiple TV's, game consoles, security cameras, etc... I can easily stream 4k to multiple tv's at once with no issues, none of my other device have any problems (or i'd hear about it) but when I stream over Airplay to my speakers they will randomly cut in/out.

I'm using a pair of Asus ET12's routers and they have never given me any problems since ownership, connections to all my devices are always solid.

I'm using an Ipad 9th gen (only Apple device I own) to stream Via Airplay to all these speakers.

 

[Burnside]

Given that an airplay stream is delivered via your iPad from whichever service you’re using and from there sent over your network to multiple speakers, it could be that the iPad isn’t up to the job of handling and distributing 8+ simultaneous airplay streams. Given apple’s closed ecosystem, I don’t know if there’s an app or another means of analysing the iPad or resulting network traffic to ascertain if that is where the problem lies.
Have you tried playing to smaller groups (e.g. all the Linkplay devices, either as an airplay group or Linkplay group), then add in other devices to see what the breaking point is? I’d even try linking the Linkplay devices then just choosing the main speaker as one airplay endpoint to see if that would help offload some of the stream distribution away from the iPad. Only drawback with that is that you might lose sync between those and the other airplay endpoints.

 

[conn]

Yeah, i've been trying to understand how Airplay works and I was wondering what exactly broadcasts the music streams to the devices.

I usually play to one single speaker (the JBL 300) or all the speakers at once so I guess i'll have to do what you suggested. The ipad is just used for Airplay, nothing else. My issue is that I moved away from Sonos to avoid this type of tinkering honestly because I just don't really want to anymore, lol. I was hoping since it was an Apple product it would just work perfectly (i'm not an Apple user).

I'm at the point now of dumping all the Audio Pro speakers and getting a few Era 100's in their place, I admittedly may have abandoned Sonos to soon for my requirements....