Hi Ernie,

To answer your question, you can use ANY electrical earth ground (AC outlet, center screw, lug from a surge protector, etc). There are all common earth ground and will work fine.

This does will not cause any ground loops as you mentioned. This is simply cleaning up the reference ground of the signal and will not create issues with other gear (even if it is hard wired).

Hmm, why is this different from any of the many A/V connection types that are grounded?

It isn't. But do you mean connected to power ground? If so, these chassis often have ways of lifting the chassis from ground, and if not, sometimes introduce hum. In that way, grounding the IR system is no different except that to be a problem its ground also has to connect to a chassis. An IR control input is where this might happen.

And you don't run a wire from a speaker negative terminal, or from the ground screw next to a phono input, to ground. All two-wire equipment is designed to work without connecting to an actual ground (except the SnapAV IR system?), but many displays and most pro gear has a grounded three-prong plug.

It is not logical (thanks, Spock) to claim that grounding the SnapAV IR system simply won't cause ground loops. To claim that is to claim that no, none, zero A/V components with IR control inputs connect the negative lead of the IR cable to the chassis of the component. There are so many manufacturers, and no rules about this, that it's bizarrely unlikely that NONE of them would have IR connections grounded to chassis.

And if you add a connection to earth ground where there was not one before, the system may simply hum, be it audio or video. The earliest examples we saw of this was in the 80s when we first started connecting the audio of cable tuners into our audio gear. Later, when monitors started having three-prong plugs, more hum resulted.

Ground loops are so common that Jensen Transformers makes a living off of solving them, most often using transformers that isolate grounds, thus breaking the loop.