Can anyone point me in the direction of articles and/or photographs of good examples of cable dressing, please? Are cable ties an absolute no-no from the sound perspective?
Never use cable ties - in my book an absolute no-no.
Use velcro ties instead.
Cable ties all too easily crush the cables which is not good.
Cables ties are very useful for folding excess speaker cable length - see pic.
Edit - agree Blythe, velcro ties remove the crush risk, but regular ties with NACA5 ‘just nipped up’ are just as good.
I believe the consensus is not to use them on IC & other signal cables, hang the lengths in loops away from floor & walls etc.
I made my own IC cables with lengths made to fit to to connection points, no more cable dressing worries.
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A couple of rules worth paying attention to: don’t run mains or power and signal cables close and parallel to each other; if they need to get close or even touch (try to avoid if possible) then make sure it’s perpendicular; make sure small signal and Burndy cables are not stressed, particularly at their connecting ends; try to avoid small signal or Burndy cables from touching walls, floors etc…
I did the Naim zigzag on speaker cables and it was a disaster. I picked up radio stations that way. I reverted to a loose coil (non touching spiral). That’s a big no no… The point being there are no absolutes or gurantees. You can dress everything right and get terrible results.
These days, I do the zig zag again but long ways up and down the length of my 3 racks so there are only 2-3 zigzags to take up the slack. No problems at all.
The rats nest round the back is controlled chaos. Things that shouldn’t touch, don’t. It isn’t pretty but let’s be honest, it’s round the back where you can’t see it. So for every spouse out there that complains about the rats nest that you can only see by craning your head unnaturally round the back of a rack… I say “well don’t look back there then!”
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speaker cable just need to be measured correctly with no slack zigzag is nonsense
How does that work if the amplifier is to the left or right of both speakers? With both wires the same length there will always be excess on one side. The way to deal with it is to run it away from the speaker and back again.
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Thanks to all for your replies. Mine looks more like Peder’s joke photo at the moment, so, much work to be done.
I use the Velcro type cable ties; gentler on cables and so easy to undo if you need to re/route or adjust, bought a bag of 100 off eBay for around £2.00. So good I bought another bag and tidied all my brother in laws ‘birds nest’ behind his AV cabinet! I just work the rule of keeping mains cables away from signal cables and not creating ‘induction’ coils of lengths of cable.
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I’d stick to Quads if I were you.
I used every cable tie method on earth and without a doubt, velcro tape has no peer. I use it everywhere. Inside servers, in the office, for the AV system. Just not for the free hanging controlled Naim rat’s nest.
Everything else is just substandard in comparison.
hungryhalibut already pointed out the possible flaw in that answer. Anyway it’s not just speaker cable that’s the problem.
I wasn’t talking to you, even though it’s your thread.
As for dressing, this is what I have at the moment and I think it works reasonably well.
Not easy to see what’s what but the Burndy’s mostly miss each other and only one of the 500 ones brushes the carpet, interconnects hang loose and nothing is tied except for the A5 excess.
There are things I could do better if sockets were in different places. The floor boards are all cut about a centimetre in front of the racks which handily decouples the rest of the room but means I can’t move them further from the wall without bridging the cut, the cut wasn’t my doing.
Yeti,…Have you made your powerstrip yourself.?
/Peder🌼
Yes, two dissimilar woods cut out to receive sIngle MK sockets daisychained with the thickest multistrand wire I could find. This was some years ago now but I prefer it to any alternative I’ve tried. Plug order makes a quite audible difference, especially the position of the 555ps with its signal earth (nearest the power input). My NAD tuner uses the second wall socket of the dedicated supply as it seems to upset the Naim boxes if on the block so I have’t tried the power amp there, in-fact that uses the second last socket before the DVD5 (digital out to 555). I still have to try swapping those two but my system has been off too many times recently to experiment and will go off again tonight for a forecast thunder storm.
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Interesting as I made an MK socket strip for a friend that looks very similar to yours. He’s hinting that he wants it rewired with a new cable & to change the daisy chain internal wiring to radial.
My own is made with MK doubles & wired in radial, problem each MK double has its outlets internally ‘daisy chained’
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Yeti…Very interesting 
.
I and a friend are manufacturing two powerstrips in wood,.just as you have done.
It also sounds exciting,.that it’s the best you’ve heard so far.
I’ll shall have Oyaide sockets,.and my friend shall have Furutech sockets.
Then it will be interesting to compare which sockets that sound best,.
We shall have the same cable between the sockets (see picture below).
This cable is “Jorma Design Duality” powercable.
This cable already has an arrow for the right direction.
So we also get that right between the sockets.
This as you write is very important,.and do as you also say a big difference.
Many people do not know this,so good that you mentioned it.
Yeti,.now that you tell me this,.I am really curious to hear the results.
/Peder 
Forgive me for intruding on your conversation. I couldn’t work out what you were refering to and assumed it was the post that Quad575 made. I’ll try to remember to think twice if I really don’t understand a post in future.
In truth the only comparison I’ve made at home apart from blocks from a DIY store was to a musicworks reflex ultra that my dealer leant me after we’d compared it to the lite version in the shop.
Do your proposed sockets keep L and N defined when you connect a plug? The French style with an earth pin does this but not some other european sockets I think.