Help my budding audiophile brother

Okay, so my brother picked up some kef qx5's yestrday based on a recommendation from me since I recently bought a pair myself and have really been enjoying them. He needs to get the rest of his gear as this is his only purchase for a dedicated two channel set-up thus far. We were looking at a used peachtree INova since it has a good dac and an i pod dock, and is an all in one piece and looks nice too. I'm wondering though if it's going to have enough oomph to power the kefs though and my other dilemma is that he'll want to listen to streaming music but he wants to be able to control what he's listening too from his listening chair. I can't figure out how to havd the i pod on the inova dock (in order to bypass the dac in the ipod and use the peachtree's dac) and still select your streaming music from the listening chair, from say, spotify.

Anyhow, we're open to any suggestions, and it doesn't have to be a peachtree. We'd like to keep the total cost between, say $1100-$1500. He likes clean looks. He does have an alienware laptop that could be incorporated also. He's going to want something with good power with a bit of "slam" in my oppinion. I was thinking peachtree because it was an all in one solution (dac, pre, amp, dock), it looks clean and he could add the peachtree 225 amp later to get more power and at that point, he'd still only have two components and they'd match and be aesthetically pleasing.

Thanks for your help with this one gang! I really want my brother to get back to enjoying music again and I think that a good rig will help him get back there!
:-)