tidying up cables

Its impossible to tell you how to fix your mess without having the mess in front of me to see what's what. A couple things we can say for sure though- you do not want to bundle power cords together, and there are things that will make an audible improvement. 

Have a look here to see what things might look like if you were able to rearrange your system for sound quality instead of rack quality.
https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367

Nothing you see in any of those images has anything to do with advice people gave me. Every single detail was worked out over the years by trial and error. You will hear a lot of opinion about Cable Elevators. They would not be there, not a one of them, if they did not work. 

First thing I would do is go on eBay and order a bunch of these ceramic insulators. Use them on the floor and use them like I do with little wood stands to support cables. Where cables must be close to each other try and arrange them so they cross at right angles.

Ultimately its best to eliminate racks like yours. What you have, a tall rack with the amp at the top so speaker cables have to be long and send their high level signal right past all the low level signals, which are all crossed over each other, is just about the worst setup imaginable. Sorry, but you see the lengths I went to avoid that. (And the result: "audiophile nirvana". So totally worth it.

But in the meantime what you do is arrange cables so if one has to go only a short distance to the next component then instead of having it all bunched up you have it go off sideways and curve back. So it crosses other cables but at a 90 degree angle. With as much space between them as you can manage.

If you somehow manage to do all this don't be surprised if you don't hear a great big improvement right away. Messing with cables, bending them around like this, messes with the sound. It will take a little while to settle back in. Not long, hour or so should do. Just enough so when you think at first what a waste of time, then later start to wonder if its really better or your mind playing tricks, its not your mind. If you do all this it really will be better.

Maybe not nirvana. But better.

I won’t be getting rid of the rack any time soon millercarbon so will have to try some of the other tweaks first. No PC bundling though.

It would appear, judging from your pix that having cables intersect is not the issue, rather, that they don’t touch. Correct?

Thanks for that link steakster.
I’ve got some of that insulation stashed somewhere and will use it where the PCs and ICs intersect. I guess one of those foam pool noodles would work too. Those flouro colours would certainly liven things up.

As mentioned, I have now run the speaker cable along the mortar joints in the brickwork which has certainly put distance between them and everything else. Some critical listening will occur today.

After that, the insulation separation suggestion will be brought into play
Thanks all!

So, power cords should not be bundled together?  I was planning on bundling the power cords together and the signal carrying cords together and then separating the two bundles.  Is that a bad idea?  Why?

Yes it is a very bad idea. Why? In a word, induction.

Every signal in every wire produces a field around that wire. Also when these fields cross a wire they induce a current in the wire. This is how transformers work. This is also how power is generated in everything from hydroelectric dams to phono cartridges. This is also one way RFI gets into systems. 

So around every power cord and interconnect is a field that varies up and down with whatever signal is in that wire. With AC its a steady 60 Hz but with music its all over the place. Either way these signals interact with any nearby wire. The result is noise. But hardly ever noise loud enough to be obvious. Instead what happens is the music signal is smeared a little and the background is gray instead of black. 

This is all highly relative. Its surprising how much of this there is even in systems that seem dead quiet and clean. Like I said you don't hear it till its gone.