Wow that's some really vintage stuff! The two boxes in front in the first pic are preamps, our Foreplay preamp from the 90s. You are correct that the Foreplay preamp does not handle a turntable directly. For that you need a separate phono preamp that goes between the turntable and the Foreplay preamp. We sold a phono preamp called the Seduction back then. It has since been refined and is now called the Reduction.
The two boxes to the rear in the first pic are the amps, one per channel. Those are Paraglows, the same vintage as the preamps and a good match indeed for La Scalas.
To cut to the chase you are correct that you don't really need the second Foreplay, so you could sell it and just keep the gear that is working right.
If you would like to learn how to work on this stuff we would be happy to help. The first thing to do would be to get copies of the manuals (we sell them as PDF files, downloadable). You would also need to pick up an inexpensive digital multimeter at Harbor Freight or Home Depot, etc. Then we could talk you through checking them over.
If you would rather have us check them over we can do that too. We have a repair service with a fixed rate that you can order. We ship you boxes to pack them in and you send them to us. We go through them and send them back. Honestly if they are working OK this is not absolutely necessary.
https://bottlehead.com/product/repair-service/
If you just need help hooking it all together to make sure it all plays music we can help with that too. Just let us know. You would need some speaker cables from the amps to the speakers, a set of RCA interconnect cables to go between the preamp and the amps, and some kind of source like a smartphone with a 1/8" headphone to RCA adapter cable, a laptop with that same adapter, a CD player with RCA interconnects, DVD player with RCA interconnects, or something similar.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2020, 02:35:46 PM by Doc B. »
Dan "Doc B." Schmalle
President For Life
Bottlehead Corp.