prk@charm.UUCP (Paul Kolodner) (04/25/85)
Several problems with using sheets of aluminum foil under carpet as speaker wires: 1. Power-handling capability of 0.001" metal is not great. 2. Inductance of wide, long sheets IS great. Terrible for response and damping. 3. Aluminum oxide is an insulator. Think about this. Contacts to aluminum automatically get opened up by growth of native oxide, leading to the only known mechanism for a speaker wire to become a rectifier. Rectifiers are nonlinear and don't make good speaker wire. This is also why there are no more houses with aluminum wiring. They've all burnt down! 4. Wide, unshielded metal seets, even if not aluminum, are susceptible to hum and rf pickup. 5. Skin depth is irrelevant at audio frequencies anyway. So forget it.