There is a tendency to treat speaker cables as a ladder: start cheap, climb until the money runs out. A week with Oyaide's three speaker designs cured us of that. These cables are less a ladder than three different answers to three different questions, and picking the right one has more to do with your amplifier and room than your budget.
All three are built on Oyaide's 102SSC precision conductor, the same peeled and annealed copper used in the brand's power cables, and all three are terminated by hand in our workshop with your choice of banana, spade or pin. Where they diverge is geometry, and geometry is where speaker cables live or die.
EXPLORER V2: the compact answer
The EXPLORER V2 is a slim 0.75sq cable that looks almost apologetic next to its siblings. Do not be fooled. Into a pair of standmounts driven by a modest integrated, it was quick, tidy and rhythmically sure footed. GoGo Penguin's "Raven" is a torture test of piano, double bass and drums fighting for the same space; the EXPLORER kept the bass lines articulate without thinning out the piano's left hand. For smaller systems, near field rigs and second rooms, it is the cable we reach for first, and its flexibility makes it the easiest of the three to dress around furniture.
ACROSS 3000: the all rounder
The ACROSS 3000 uses Oyaide's C.I.S. structure, which suspends the conductors in an air layer that acts as a mechanical damper. In practice it is the most neutral cable of the three, and the one we would pick if forced to live with a single design. On Jacqueline du Pre's Elgar Cello Concerto, the cello occupied a believable space between the speakers with the orchestra arrayed behind rather than around it, a trick that lesser cables flatten into a single plane. Bass was extended without the midbass hump that plagues fat generic cable. If your system already sounds right and you simply want more of it, start here.
TUNAMI NIGO V2: the heavyweight
Then there is the TUNAMI NIGO V2, 5.5sq per conductor and heavy enough that we terminate it with spades more often than bananas for the sake of the binding posts. It needs an amplifier with real current delivery to justify itself, and given one, the payoff is scale. The Cantate Domino recording's organ pedal notes pressurised our listening room with a composure the other two could not match, and Hugh Masekela's "Stimela" had drums that landed like weather. In a small room with a polite amplifier it can actually be too much of a good thing, overdriving the low end. With a beefy power amp and full range speakers, it is extraordinary.
Verdict
Small system, EXPLORER V2 and spend the savings on music. Balanced system you already love, ACROSS 3000. Big amplifier, big speakers, big room: the NIGO earns its keep. All three are cut to your exact length and finished with rhodium plated pure copper connectors, so there is no wrong choice, only a wrong match. Tell us what you are driving and we will tell you which one we would buy.