I know they are passive, but what are some good brands or receivers that I could use with an Audio Technica LP120 turntable?
Also, does the type of speaker wire I use matter too?
Speaker wire only matters in terms of getting a thick enough gauge of wire so that the signal can be transmitted without degradation/interference. There aren’t different types of wire with different sound qualities and hyper expensive fancy wires with higher fidelity or any number of other audiophile traps here, though people may try to convince you otherwise.
Unless you are running speaker wire 20+ feet to each speaker 16 gauge wire works fine though you can get away with 18 or 20 most of the time.
If your speakers were 4ohm they require more juice to power so you want to go a bit thicker to 14 or 12 but I believe your jbl hs610 are 8ohm.
This article is really helpful https://www.crutchfield.com/S-mfBm9vibh9V/learn/learningcenter/home/speakers_wire.html
edit nope see this nonsense, crutchfield gives some decent advice and then swerves off the cliff into pseudo-science territory with talking about special high quality speaker cables that make the music sound “more alive”.
Lol nope, trust me if electricity worked like that a whole lot of industries with a whole lot more monetary interest in knowing how electricity worked would have spent a massive amount of money and time figuring this out. It is a nothingburger you could hack apart practically any old insulated copper wire of a high enough gauge and use it as a speaker cable if you wanted to.