@lollipopguild
starred earth (ground)
Think of your circuit breaker box as home base, and a single point. Each individual circuit in your house (apartment, condo or office building), or run of AC wiring, ends up terminating in this load center. This is also where all of the grounds (including your ground rods and utility pipe grounds - water/gas pipe) to these circuits terminate. If you saw this single point in your circuit breaker box (even though it’s a bus bar), with all of these grounds attached, it would kind of look like a star. Hence the reference.
Star grounding can also relate to audio gear AC power connections. If the gear has 3 prong plugs, when plugging them all into a wall outlet, or power strip, the 3rd prong is the earth ground. You want only one ground connection per piece of audio equipment, hopefully on the same circuit, unless you have separate circuits with dedicated isolated grounds. Connecting audio gear together which is on different circuits can create ground loops, since the grounds on other circuits may be at a different ground potential. In that case, if you’re connecting via balanced XLR connections, it’s important to pay attention to pin 1 of the XLR connection. In that case, to prevent a ground loop, pin 1 should be lifted on one end of the cable.
@audio-union
A star ground is a pattern of 3 or more grounding rods all connected together and connected to the earth ground terminal in a power distribution box.
Having dealt with lightning strikes to radio broadcast towers on an annual basis for many decades, and electricians installing ground systems to divert these strikes, the better choice is to connect all ground rods together (not as individual runs to the single point of reference), with *one* connection to the single point of reference. You can also form a loop of ground rods around a building, with both loop ends tied to the single star point.
