Hi tony.r,

Star Ground or Bus ? The star is to difficult
to locate problems from.

I don't think so. If star ground is _consequently_
used, it is a good as any other _consequently_
used grounding strategy, like plane ground.

Problems only arise when one mixes several strategies.

BTW, a bus ground is just a stretched star ground :-)
with the exception, that sometimes it isn't as
easy to predict in which direction the electrons
flow between the taps to the bus ...

Personally, I prefer star grounds with sub-stars:
Each channel has its own star (or 2, for the driver
and the power stages, at convenient points, where the
low level signals are fed in), and each of this
stars is connected to a central ground star at the big
PSU filter caps with _one_ wire (so no star-to-star
conections, execept to the central star).

It is good practice to give low-level high-gain
stages their own sub-stars, with ground connections
as short as possible to the star placed at strategic
position near by.

All ground stars are insulated from the chassis,
and there is only _one_ connection from the central
star to the chassis plane via a 10 ohms / 10 watts
resistor (tnx to Patrick Turner for that tip), and
the chassis plane being connected to mains earth wire.

Regarding inputs and volume controls, I just follow
Fred Nachbaurs "patch cable approach" with great
results.

Except for the missing chassis shielding effect
I get even very hum-free breadboard level circuits
this way :-)

I think with a consequent star ground strategy you
simply can't go wrong and I don't mind that this
approach will need some feet of black insulated
wire even for medium comlexity projects, since this
wire is cheap when you use 1 mm^2 solid copper wire
as used in home mains installations.

Tom

--
A consultant is a man who knows 40 ways to make love,
but doesn't know any women.