Zaor Miza Z Flex & Griprack MkII

The assembled Miza Z Flex desk with two Griprack 4 MkII units perched on top. It won’t stay this tidy for long...

Zaor’s Miza range promises smart, affordable, self‑assembly furniture to suit every studio.

If you think about the items that are essential to any studio, the first things that come to mind are probably mics, speakers, keyboards, recording software and hardware, and so on. But there’s another class of things that are just as vital, and easy to overlook when you’re planning a new setup. The fact that they don’t themselves produce or capture sound doesn’t make cables, stands, lights or acoustic treatment any the less important — and the same is true of studio furniture.

Back in the day, when studios were based around consoles costing six figures, any furniture and racking would typically have been constructed on site by a carpenter as part of the build. That’s still the preferred option today, but it does have some disadvantages. Having furniture custom made is costly, can be slow, and means you end up with something that can’t easily be repurposed when you move to another space. At the other end of the spectrum, domestic and office furniture is often pressed into service in a home‑studio environment. This is usually the cheapest approach, but kitchen tables and computer desks are not ergonomically or acoustically optimised for the needs of the studio engineer, and are unlikely to have rack slots or speaker stands built in.

Fortunately, there’s a middle way, and it’s catered to by manufacturers such as Zaor, who offer self‑assembly furniture targeted at home and professional studios. Zaor will undertake custom commissions and adaptations, but in most cases, buyers choose from a palette of options with different dimensions and features. Your chosen furniture is then shipped in flat‑pack form from Zaor’s factory in Romania, ready for you to put together at your leisure.

All Fours

The Zaor catalogue features four main ranges. The Classic line includes racks and speaker stands, plus desks aimed both at ‘in the box’ and console‑based control rooms. Most are built from solid wood, and as the name suggests, the design aims for a timeless, classy appearance. Those seeking a more modern and stylised look can turn to the iDesign line, which offers a striking minimalist aesthetic. Both of these are premium ranges, which are likely to find their way mainly into professional and high‑end project studios. For the rest of us, Zaor also offer the Vision and Miza lines.

The desks and racks in the Vision range share something of the same ‘designer’ aesthetic as the iDesign products, with a strong black‑and‑white colour theme and bold use of triangle shapes. But the widest range of Zaor furniture is to be found under the Miza name. There are no fewer than 15 Miza products at the time of writing, including desks, speaker stands and racks. The general vibe is modern, but in quite an understated way compared to the iDesign or Vision models, with smooth curves taking the place of sharp angles. Two colour schemes are available: ‘wengé grey’ and black with cherry wood highlights.

Getting A Grip

Strangely enough, in over two decades working at SOS, the only purpose‑built piece of studio furniture I’ve ever owned is a small wooden studio rack built by our esteemed Paul White. Most of my gear has been housed in portable racks for location use, or perched on top of repurposed kitchen tables, office desks and so on. That has always worked OK, but it brings its share of annoyances. It’s impossible to keep cables tidy, or easily access a MIDI keyboard and its QWERTY counterpart at the same time; and perfecting monitor placement is always a challenge, whether you try to perch them on the table or use separate stands.

Consequently, I was very willing to try out some of the options from Zaor’s Miza range. These include desks with integrated racks and/or speaker stands as well as ‘separates’. I quickly decided that the latter would be better options, and because I need to swap out pieces of gear quite often, I was particularly taken with the concept of the Miza Griprack II: a free‑standing rack case available in 2U and 4U variants, which can either sit on top of a desk or be clamped to it. As well as offering easy access to the rear, the Griprack also features a special foam damping pad on top which is purposely designed to support monitor speakers.

The Griprack MkII features a foam pad on top that is designed to support monitor speakers.

I decided to pair two Gripracks with the biggest flat‑topped desk in the Miza range, the Z Flex. This offers plenty of surface real estate for positioning the Gripracks either side of a computer monitor, as well as offering useful features like a large cable channel and a slide‑out keyboard tray. For disclosure, I should point out that manufacturers usually send review gear to SOS on loan, which is then returned after the reviewer has done his or her work. That’s not feasible in the case of studio furniture, so it was agreed in advance that the Zaor items would remain with me after the review period.

Desk Jockeying

The review furniture arrived rather unexpectedly one Thursday afternoon on the back of a small truck (it was lucky I was in, really). The driver helped me manhandle it into the building, which is good, because the larger of the two Z Flex boxes weighs 71kg. Unpacking the boxes revealed that everything was present and correct. Affordability is the raison d’être of the Miza range, and Zaor have evidently achieved this through two main goals. First, there are almost no metal components, at least in the items I tried. Second, the panels are all made of ‘furnitureboard’ or MFC rather than solid wood.

If you’ve ever put together a piece of furniture from IKEA or similar, you’ll be familiar with the construction principles used in the Zaor Miza range. Pre‑drilled holes need to be populated either with small wooden dowels or with what Zaor call ‘system bolts’: metal bolts with an ‘eye’ into which cone‑shaped screws are driven to fix a connection. You’ll need a crosshead screwdriver, and a rubber mallet or hammer is useful to tap in the dowels. Clear printed instructions are included, and also available as PDFs on the Zaor site along with construction videos.

Wood prices have gone through the roof over the last couple of years, and if you were to make something the size of the Z Flex from marine ply or similar, you’d be looking at hundreds of poundsdollars for materials alone.

It took me a little over an hour to put together the Z Flex desk (and much longer to clear the space in the studio!). Most of this can be done by one person, but you’ll definitely need a helper for the final stages, especially putting the top onto the frame. There’s an element of customisation, in that you can select one of several heights for the pull‑out keyboard tray. I got this the wrong way around on my first attempt and ended up with the tray on its lowest rather than highest setting, but that’s mainly down to my own lack of handiness.

The Gripracks are trivially simple to assemble, and even come with the dowels pre‑inserted into the holes. A nice touch is that you get a large pack of rack bolts and washers along with the components needed to build the actual rack itself. 

Flexible Friends

With everything in place, my studio certainly looked smarter and more professional than it had before. The basic nature of the materials isn’t apparent in the assembled desk, which looks and feels very solid. Only time will tell how long this feeling will persist, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t last as long as the desk isn’t subjected to ill treatment. (The wengé grey desktop is quite vulnerable to liquid marking, so be careful with those coffee cups.) My experience is that this sort of self‑assembly furniture doesn’t like being repeatedly disassembled and then put back together again, but Hugh Robjohns reports that his seven‑year‑old Miza 88XL still looks and performs as good as new despite having undergone this process at least once.

Ergonomically, the Z Flex ticks a lot of boxes. There are discreet cable ports at both rear corners, and these open onto a capacious channel with Velcro cable tidies. Two further ports lead from this to the back of the keyboard tray, which slides in and out smoothly enough on its metal runners. I only have a lightweight USB keyboard but I’m confident this would happily support a hefty 88‑note master keyboard if needed — it’s rated at 40kg. Alternatively, it could be very useful for other gear that needs to be within easy reach.

The Gripracks are, if anything, even smarter than the desk, and the ease of access to the rear for plugging and unplugging is a revelation. I had no trouble fitting two nearfield monitor speakers on top of each rack. Initially I had assumed they were meant to sit on top of the desk, in which case the adjustable front 'feet' allow you to vary the angle of the rack and leave a neat cavity under the racks which is quite useful for small computers, cables and so on. However, as a reader then pointed out to me, they're not called Gripracks for nothing! The slot that extends about halfway into the depth of the rack is tailored to fit over the top of the desk, allowing the Griprack to be mounted with the lowest rack unit flush to the desktop and securely tightened with the 'feet'. 

Impressions

My overall impression is very positive, then, but I would note a couple of reservations about the design. Although the height of the keyboard/accessory drawer on the Z Flex can be varied, that of the desk surface itself is fixed, and at 820mm above the ground, it’s relatively high. That’s not a problem in itself, but it means that the top of a 4U Griprack MkII placed on the desk is almost at ear height even before you place a monitor speaker on top of it. As a result, it’s difficult to avoid having the tweeters firing over your head. This is better with the Griprack clamped to the desk rather than on top of it, but still a little on the high side.

The open back of the Griprack makes access to rear‑panel sockets refreshingly easy.A related issue is that the curved panels at the rear of the Griprack extend some 200mm beyond the foam panel on which your monitors sit. This, in effect, means that even with the rear of the rack hard against the wall of the studio, your speakers will inevitably be quite some distance away from it. That’s generally not recommended from an acoustic point of view as it brings speaker‑boundary interference response (SBIR) into play. Having said that, though, I didn’t notice a deterioration in the low‑frequency response in my own studio, and I’ve yet to experiment with treatment behind the speakers.

In terms of price, there’s no doubt that the Zaor furniture will work out quite a bit cheaper than having something custom made. Wood prices have gone through the roof over the last couple of years, and if you were to make something the size of the Z Flex from marine ply or similar, you’d be looking at hundreds of poundsdollars for materials alone. At the same time, though, the studio furniture market is a niche one, and doesn’t quite enjoy the same economies of scale as the wider office furniture market, so you’ll pay more for a Zaor desk than you would for a generic office desk of similar size and quality. Having now tried both, I feel the studio‑specific features of the Z Flex — especially the cable management and slide‑out, heavy‑duty keyboard tray — probably justify this premium, and as long as you’re not planning on moving studios too often, it’s a worthwhile investment. For me, though, it’s the Griprack that is the real life‑changer, and I think they’ll be responsible for a large reduction in the amount of cursing emanating from my room!