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.