AVA Media unveils flagship Zara Premium music server

Hot on the heals of its RIP-N-PLAY all-in-one music ripper, store and server, British company AVA Media has unveiled its new flagship model, the £1899 Zara Premium.

Housed in a high-quality aluminium body, the Zara Premium is much slimmer (35x20x3.6cm) than the £799 RIP-N-PLAY and has a host of additional features.

It has two 1TB hard disks installed as standard, offers bit-perfect audio ripping to WAV, and can also encode to FLAC, MP3 or WMA if required. It can also rip CDs to a local hard disk drive or NAS device.

There's sufficient storage on board to store up to 2450 CDs in WAV format or 4250 in FLAC.

The unit can control up to six UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) devices, and will transcode high-resolution audio files to a lower resolution on the fly for playback on non high-res systems such as Sonos.

There's full UPnP control for Linn, Sonos and Roku systems and a built-in network music scanner allows the unit to index music found on other networked devices such as a NAS drive or from a USB device.

Designed and built in the UK, the Zara Premium is available now from retailers listed on the AVA Media website.

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Andy Clough

Andy is Global Brand Director of What Hi-Fi? and has been a technology journalist for 30 years. During that time he has covered everything from VHS and Betamax, MiniDisc and DCC to CDi, Laserdisc and 3D TV, and any number of other formats that have come and gone. He loves nothing better than a good old format war. Andy edited several hi-fi and home cinema magazines before relaunching whathifi.com in 2008 and helping turn it into the global success it is today. When not listening to music or watching TV, he spends far too much of his time reading about cars he can't afford to buy.