Hi All, Hope you are having a great day.
What is the worst thing which would happen if an AMP were to fail/break.
I have a 30-35 year old AMP and at the moment it works completely fine. However what is the worse thing which would happen if it failed.
Would it blow my speakers, my ear drums in turn?
I have no idea why, but im scared of it deafening / damaging my ears if it were to fail.
AMP: TEAC A-H300
This is the only amp I have ever used and it’s really good, it was passed down to me.
Love the honesty of your question.
If audio equipment had a harmful/destructive failure mode, we’d have heard about it by now.
Even a loud sound is still a sound, and that means the amp would still be causing the speakers to oscillate. To some, we might describe that condition as “a poor signal-to-noise ratio”.
Usually, equipment dies with pathos… a whine, a squeal, or one singular pop, then ominous silence. The worst is when it dies alone in a dark room between when you turned it off and when it wouldn’t turn back on.
Sometimes a dramatic flash, but that’s rare. There may be the eye-watering smell of burned insulation. There are those with enough experience to even discern where the problem occurred by the sound it made when it died.
My first thought when I read your question was to look at which subreddit I was in… if this question were asked in r/guitar or r/toobamps, you would have many many posts about favorite ways their different amps have died in the past.
Thankfully for audiophiles, hardware death is much less common.