Novice attempting to bi-amp. Help

Choose wisely, Luke Skywalker! That's the best advice for bi-amping. I would NOT use Carver amps at all for anything except maybe Sub Bass. Why? Because they are not particularly low in distortion or pleasing in subjective quality to my ears...

Having said that, I agree with Sean about the relative merits of "vertical" vs. "horizontal" amp application.

You can check your crosstalk by putting a dummy load on one
channel of your amp, the speaker on the other, play the signal ONLY into the one channel with the dummy load at normal listening levels, and see what you hear (if anything) from the speaker. That's your crosstalk in practical terms.

It should be >30-40dB down worst case.

I'd try to find a very high quality amp for the top end... since that's whats going to effect the overall quality of the sound that you hear. The highs have an inordinate contribution to what you perceive out of a speaker...

If you bypass the crossover in the speaker, and go with an electronic crossover, you might be pleasantly surprised at how much better the ribbons can sound without the Carver
parts in there... Since the ribbons themselves without the xover are almost completely resistive, it is a very easy load to drive, so you only need a sweet sounding amp, not one that is both sweet and can drive wierd loads!

similarly, I'd swap out the caps if they are not already Polypropylenes in the HP section immediately regardless...

If you do decide to use the internal crossover, I'd set up a little box with a 1st order high pass (a cap and some resistors) to feed the HF amps (or do it internally) so that that section sees a 6dB/oct rolloff from about 1 octave below the Carver's crossover point. This will keep all the LF energy out of those amps. Automatically less intermodulation, no matter what.

Regardless, look for some nice sounding amps for the ribbon part of the speaker, imho.

Sean, the unused channel should probably be grounded, although that doesn't actually simulate operating conditions. So, I'd suggest alternately terminating the interconnect with another bit of local gear (like the output of a CD player not playing but on...

In lab tests the other channel is usually grounded.

Obviously the best separation is going to be a set of monoblock amps with separate supplies and chassis. That should be nearly infinite. Everything else is less.

I don't have any figures at hand for commercial amps, but they should be close to the noise floor unless there is a problem modulating the power supply at high loads (there can be). But this should not show up until you really suck some power. Or, on occasion there is radiation due to the current drawn through a conductor.

(you can make a nifty thing using a loop of wire as a transmitter, like around the room, and an inductor on the input of a preamp fed to an earphone - you can "broadcast"
directly on audio that way)