HomePod mini starting songs part way through

HomePod minis set as stereo pair. Latest firmware as of January 2025. Strong WiFi connection, yet when I play an album it sometimes skips the last 20 seconds of a track and jumps to the next one. More often than not if it plays a track through it jumps to the middle of the next track then restarts and plays the song in full.

I played an album with 10 songs this afternoon and it cut the end off two tracks and skipped and restarted four tracks. I swear it's got worse in the last four of five months.

I've seen other posts from two years back about the same issue. I can't believe Apple hasn't fixed this already. I'm going to try unpairing the two and see if it works more smoothly with a single HomePod mini.