Ideas on how to improve setup please

"...But the Hawks obviously have their limits..."  

He says he has Staafs not Hawks. 

Once you get fairly decent components then its generally better to get the most out of them before upgrading to more expensive components. Right now its almost like you have no wire at all, so that's first on the list. But then before say a new cartridge you should improve what you have with Synergistic PHT, fO.q tape, springs, and a solid shelf or sand box. These will cost about the same or probably much less than a cartridge, but be at least as big an improvement. Unlike the cart that wears out the PHT, Pods, etc are used pretty much forever. 

My standard for years has been Synergistic and I still think they are a safe bet and solid value. But enough guys here who seem reliable have compared directly and prefer Black Cat- even though they are a lot less money, which is a huge plus.

You can't judge quality by price but the gear you have puts you in the $3-500 and up range for speaker cable, power cords, interconnect. Each. Won't believe the difference. Night and day.

Ok this is great stuff, thanks everyone for your input...

I will tackle better speaker cables first:

-I have emailed Cullen about cables
-Raven Audio is looking the most straight forward, 2 meter pair for 184.00
-AudioEnvy has two options SP6 and SP9 (which one?) and can choose banana or spades and length, seems pretty good option
-Black Cat looks the most expensive - the 3232 1.5mpr for 649.00 - is that for a pair and what mpr should I be ordering?
-just way too many options on audio art cable to figure out which ones to get

Leaning towards Raven Audio or AudioEnvy as such if anyone can help clarify the above questions...

Thanks!

Then guess its RCA cables (guess will order from whichever company I get the speaker cables from) a new amp power cord (I cant believe a power cord actually makes a difference!) - then onto improving the DAC and phono preamp (what is the DAC and phono suggestion?)...and then some of the other stuff mentioned...this is very exciting, looking forward to improving things!

Hard to know without hearing side by side of course but when the price differential is that great you will in general find the more expensive one is indeed quite a bit better. There's an awful lot of nonsense out there about wire, the worst being the stuff that tries to give the impression "its just wire" when in fact it is every bit as much a component as any other. And yes that includes the power cord too! 

Rather than cross your fingers and buy, and instead of asking here which amounts to crossing your fingers hoping the right guy replies, I would go search for already existing comments. That's what I always do. Started off many years ago never buying anything I hadn't compared at home. But that was long ago. Now every single thing in my system was bought purely off on-line research. https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367 Yes every single one of these.  

A good example is Black Cat. New enough I never heard of until this week. Soon as someone halfway credible said something good I went and did a search. In no time flat this turned up threads with solid comments and eventually finding ones directly useful as they compared head to head with stuff I was familiar with.  

This is the way you go about it. If you want to do well, and not just spend money. Everyone here happy to help you spend money. I seem to be the only one saying whoa, slow down hoss, think man think.

The good news is its hard to go wrong. You can do this stuff in just about any order. Its just usually better in the long run to tackle the worst stuff first. In your case wire. All the wire.  

But then where almost everyone messes up is they ignore the advice of guys like me and mahgister and instead of tweaking the most out of what they have immediately start running the upgrade hamster wheel.  

If you think power cords are hard to believe, try a couple of these. https://www.amazon.com/Generator-Schumann-Ultra-low-Frequency-Resonator/dp/B07WWD17FV/ref=sr_1_15?dc...   One worked, two were better, and I kept adding more and now up to 7. Mahgister uses 9. The two most notoriously cheap audiophiles on the site aren't recommending stuff like this just to be spending money. We use it because it works. Another one I learned about not by asking questions but by reading, following up on comments, and doing my own research.

Black Cat Coppertone Flatwave is a fine IC.  Competitive with those other brands.  The problem is choosing.