Reddit reviews Logitech Squeezebox Touch (Discontinued by Manufacturer)

14awg wire should work for just about anything unless you are putting them more than 10 feet.

There is a fella here who likes to put books under his heresy II's to angle them up -- I don't quite remember why but it may be something to keep in mind or try out when setting them up, I think it was about a 2 inch lift in the front.

The big idea of a preamp is to keep the low level signal away from the ridiculous power supply in the power amp.. in reality it's not a big deal and people do it mainly because high end gear is sold that way, you can get a higher end preamp that just does it's job and does it well instead of an afterthought add on part of a power amp.

Tubes do strange things to audio, it is distortion of the signal, but in a unique way that literally pulls out things that are quiet in a recording and basically raising their volume, this creates the sparkle effect you may have read about. Also they have an effect on the low end that boosts the bass frequencies by compressing the sounds, causing the bass to get fuller(louder). These effects can be subtle at low volumes, and vary from tube amp to tube amp.

Solid state has lots of different categories.. it breaks down into classes dictated by the way the amp is designed to to it's job not as a rating of good or bad. Class A is silly accurate, very hot, and very pricey in general.. if you have more than $700 to spend on just a stereo amp and don't mind 50 plus pounds of aluminum heating up your room then I can toss out a recommendation for these.. Class A/B is pretty much 95% of the market.. the first 1-5 watts of power runs at class A and the rest works with not so clean class B to do the job when you crank the volume knob or the music gets loud. Class D offers a huge swing of really crappy cheap amps just made to push power with no real design for fidelity, this will be used mainly in plate amps for subwoofers to OK cheap amps Dayton audio T-Amps would fall into this range to Holy crap that sounds amazing which is more of the B&O ICE amps and the Hypex module amps.

If you have a budget, I'm assuming that you do and that it's possibly pretty low since these were given to you I would focus on two purchases to make these things work together in a nice clean user friendly way.

An interface to your music is a good start. I like the Logitech Squeezebox, it's the one peice of gear I have no desire to upgrade. It works with my phone as a remote control and pulls music from my computer and subscription services without any hassle. If you like using your TV while listening to music(I'll never understand this) the WD live box is pretty good and offers onsite storage via the western digital external hard drives that work well with it.

The next step is an amp/receiver.. your old Scott is probably planing to burn up and die. I would suggest getting a newer receiver. The cheap one I like is the Harman Kardon HK 3390 it's got low distortion figures (0.07 at 80 watts both channels driven) this is hella good for a Class A/B especially for less than $250 bucks.

If I've undershot your budget let me know.

there are a lot of options, but what I'm getting at is this

from your first post you didnt make it clear that you had a display of any kind in the room (read: TV).

you used to be able to get stuff like this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002LARRDA

they dont really make stuff like this anymore. i mean they do, but they tend to be niche products made by legacy audiophile companies and charge an arm and a leg times 10.

most people dont need a visual interface on the device itself, but on a phone or tablet is good enough. the audio does not come from the phone or tablet, the phone or tablet simply acts a visual remote control. some people mount a tablet to the wall and the tablet is simply used as a music controller and has no other function.

from here you have a ton of options. there are mass produced devices like Sonos or Denon HEOS. you can build a small PC out of an Intel NUC or Raspberry Pi. you can buy readymade mini PCs for this purpose. and the software that you can use is endless. i personally like j.river on a PC for audio.

that being said. if its being hooked up to a TV (or even a monitor)...then that changes things. i would probably go with a raspberry pi or an android based media player. again, many software choices. so the shield you picked would work out fine.

the reason i suggested a network drive, is because do you really want to be moving the hard drive back and forth and back and forth when you add new music instead of it just having to go automatically when you download new music? it can still be hardwired to the music player, but wirelessly sync new music every time its downloaded. you dont really want to be moving the hard drive constantly right?

in anycase, a shield can act as a file server. you can have a non network drive attatched via USB and you can access it via the network from your itunes PC to download new files directly there. Id still do it the network drive route...but you dont have to.

I have this one. Now I just realised it says that it's an amplifier, but it does have the functions of a mixer (I think) :D
Well, I mean I use it to transfer audio from my TV to the speakers and also from my audio streamer to the same speakers, so yeah, I'm pretty sure there won't be much problems with this one, it's quite strong.