This British-built unit makes storing music for home streaming both simple and logical

Recent issues of Gramophone have seen a lot of coverage in of streaming music players, able to access network-stored content – either on a home computer or a dedicated network-attached storage device (or NAS), and play it through the audio system.

There’s a huge range of options when it comes to playing such music, from inexpensive computer add-ons all the way through to complete audio systems such as the Naim Uniti range, Linn’s Kiko or the Cyrus Streamline, not to mentiona micro systems from the likes of Denon, Marantz and Onkyo.

You can buy network music players – essentially the network version of a CD player, but with the added benefit of internet radio – right up to the very high end, AV receivers with streaming capability, even a streaming preamplifier around which you can build a system.

There’s also a confusing array of features and facilities on offer: some products offer wireless and wired network connection, some only wired; some have Apple AirPlay connectivity for iPods, iPads and iPhones, or computers running iTunes; some can access Spotify’s music streaming services, others Napster, others Last.fm; and some can play all kinds of formats up and including 192kHz/24-bit high resolution, while others play a limited range of file types, and may or may not offer gapless playback.

The 'other end' of the system
What’s often overlooked in all this streaming stuff is the ‘other end’ of the system: the device used to store the music ready to be accessed by a network player.

Yes, you have your music on a normal computer, provided it’s running something like Windows Media (on a PC) or third party DLNA/UPnP (Digital Living Network Alliance/Universal Plug and Play) software to make it visible to such a player.

However, this involves leaving the computer on at all times, so a more convenient solution is to use a server or NAS device on your home network, able to be accessed by all devices connected to that network.

At its simplest, this can be a basic network-attached device, to which you rip your music using the CD/DVD drive in your home computer – you can buy these ‘off the shelf’, and I’ve posted a piece here recounting my experiences of building and setting up such a device.

However, while this may seem the simplest solution, without a degree of knowing what you’re doing the reality of getting such a set-up running smoothly can be anything but relaxing. For that reason, a number of manufacturers have rather more listener-friendly ripping/storage solutions available, designed so that you have to do little more than load a disc to have it copied, identified, catalogued and made available on your home network.

For a while I have been using Naim’s UnitiServe, a small brick-like black box combining a ripping drive and hard-disk storage, alongside my main NAS system: it’s available in a variety of forms, dependent on whether you want to use it alone or store the music it rips on external hard-drives, and is controlled via either an app running on iOS devices or a web-based interface.

However, a recent arrival on the scene is another British company, AVA Media, with a range of storage solutions for music, all housed in slimline aerospace-quality casework, and with fanless designs to run silently, enabling them to be used in the listening room rather than hidden away.

The entry-level model is the AVA Media Rip-n-Play, while at the top of the line is the modular Zaram, able to rip, store and serve music along with DVDs and Blu-rays. It uses up to five Zaram-X9 mass-storage units, each capable of holding around 9TB of content.

Sitting between them is the Zara Premium we have here, a single-box solution combining the functions of ripper, storage, internet radio and player. Selling for £1899, it has two 1TB hard drives within, and these can either be mirrored for safety of storage or used to give more space, while extra USB or network drives can also be used to expand its capacity.

Bit-perfect rips
It can make bit-perfect rips of CDs, storing up to 2450 discs in uncompressed WAV or 4250 in lossless FLAC form, will look up disc information and and tag files as they’re created, and as well as making lossless or uncompressed copies can also encode MP3 or WMA versions, transcoding ‘on the fly’ if the playback device can’t handle high-resolution files.

Indexing of files on other devices, such as extra NAS units, is possible, allowing the Zara Premium to present content from several drives as a single library, and it can also control up to six UPnP players, allowing it to ‘drive’ the likes of Sonos devices, Linn’s Kiko system and so on.

PERFORMANCE
It’s tempting to sum up the Zara Premium in three words – ‘It just works’ – , for that sums up most of the experience of using the device. Once set up and configured, which on the most basic level can be done in a few minutes or – should you want to exploit some of its additional features – certainly no more than half an hour or so.

It can be operated using a mouse and keyboard hooked up to two of the four USB sockets, plus a monitor connected in directly via VGA or HDMI outputs, or over the network using from a dedicated Desktop Client application provided for Windows, Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Client on Macs or – undocumented, this one – Naim’s free n-Serve app running on iOS devices such as iPhones or iPads.

Connections are provided on USB, Ethernet and both analogue and electrical digital audio, enabling the Zara Premium to operate as a standalone solution if required, connected directly to an audio system.
It will even operate as an internet radio ‘tuner’, allowing you to find and store favourite stations.

All of which is packed into a truly tiny package – it’s just 35cm wide and 20cm deep, and stands a mere 3.6cm tall – , but one exuding quality, thanks in no small part to that top-notch aluminium casework and seamless finish.

Those readers who contacted me to say the big product name on the AVA Media Rip-n-Play put them off buying one will find this a much more discreet unit!

Menus are clear and easy to follow, and as soon as music is ripped and stored – a matter of no more than popping the disc into the slot and waiting for it to come out again – it appears on the control screen, tagged and with appropriate artwork when found (which is most of the time).

Two copies are made: one a bit-perfect copy of the CD, the other according to the user’s preferences – one of those additional settngs to be made.

After that, you can use the unit as a standalone player connected into an amplifier, or as a source for any number of network music player devices. I tried it both connected directly to my Naim Supernait amplifier using both digital and analogue connections (just to assess the quality of the onboard D-to-A conversion), and as source for both the Naim NDS and the original model NaimUniti now providing kitchen/dining room music.

In each case the Zara Premium acquitted itself well, though I was a little disappointed to see that analogue audio out was only provided on a 3.5mm stereo ‘headphone socket’ – a pair of RCA phonos would have been good.

However, with a high-quality 3.5mm-to-phonos cable the ZP sounds good: not as good as a digital feed straight into the Supernait’s own DAC, and not a patch on, say, a Naim ND5 XS player (let alone the NDS/555PS I am using at the moment), but on a par with a decent mid-range CD player. I wouldn’t use it as my main player, but as a secondary source in another room, to complement an audiophile network player in a main system, it would be more than acceptable.

Connecting digitally is a different matter, suggesting the player with an offboard DAC could be very good indeed.

As I suggested near the beginning of this review, you could do most of what the Zara Premium does with a NAS unit, a ripping device, and a further unit to provide control and playback capability. But that misses the point of this device: it’s designed to provide simplicity of operation while at the same time delivering very flexible operation and high-quality sound. And that’s a brief it meets extremely well.


SPECIFICATION
AVA Media Zara Premium
Type CD ripper/music server
Price £1899
Disc drive CD transport for ripping
Hard discs 2x1TB, configurable for mirroring or extended storage
Storage capacity Uncompressed WAV 2450 CDs, FLAC 4250 CDs (across the 2x 1TB HDDs, not mirrored)
Processor Intel Dual Core
Connections Ethernet, 4xUSB, HDMI, electrical digital, analogue audio, RS232 for control
Dimensions (WxHxD) 35x3.6x20cm
www.ava-media.com

DESIGN NOTES
John Booth, Head Software Developer, AVA Media

On opera, New Orleans jazz – and the importance of multiple formats

John Booth is responsible for the software driving the Zara Premium, and says that his earliest musical experiences revolved around his parents’ Pye Black Box record player, with a wide assortment of classical LPs ‘with a definite bias towards opera - plus the odd bit of New Orleans jazz thrown in for good measure.’

His favourite works tend to be choral, particularly Bach, so it’s no surprise that the St Matthew Passion played a major part of his tuning work on the Zara, though he says that ‘with so many music lovers at AVA Media we used an extremely wide selection of recordings.’

He says his desert island discs would have to include some Mozart operas, but his most memorable musical experiences have come during the Gower Festival of Music, hearing a range of classical piece played in small churches: ‘The combination of wonderful music played in beautiful churches was quite sublime.’

Booth says he thinks a key feature of the Zara Premium is its ability to store both bit-perfect and compressed version of a disc simultaneously, as well as transcoding high-resolution music ‘on the fly’ for playback on multiroom systems.

He thinks selling high-quality to the ‘iPod generation’ is just a matter of demonstration: ‘I’ve introduced my teenage children to the joys of listening to their music on a non-compromised audio system. and it’s something to which they now always return.’