Yeah an amp can short out blowing your speakers but highly unlikely. I guess an amp to burst into flames and blast a sound so awful you go deaf and never get to listen to the wonderful art of music ever again. But amps and your outlets have fuses in them to prevent the ideas within your vivid imagination from coming true.

To put some perspective on it, a failure of a solid state amplifier is very unlikely.

The most likely thing to go would be the power supply capacitors, but with regular use it’s even less likely (regular charge keeps them fresh!) and the symptom of failure there is buzz, which gives you a good warning.

Transistors and other things could fail, but then the most likely case is a small pop and then a non-working amp, it’s unlikely to fail dangerously.

They’re fairly safe overall, especially if it’s been running well for 30 years I would expect it to do so for 30 more at least.

Fire.

And it attempts to take your house with it. It’s a long shot, but I’ve seen capacitors blow like a firecracker. Complete with fire and smoke.

The worst case scenario if the amp failed and caught on fire would be your house burning down and losing your family. Boom drop the microphone.

I had an amp develop a pop (caps shot) on one channel on power up and it took out a tweeter

One amplifier failure mode is to pass DC current out of the speaker terminals. You’d get cone/voice coil slam that could be damaging depending on the speakers and the amplitude. The protection circuit should cut in, but no system is perfect.

if you are worried about your ears, use ear plugs until you are comfortable

I regularly use solid state amps that are over 30 years old. I just sent one in for service because of an oscillating distortion and flashing power light in one channel. No damage whatsoever to the speaker and no flames shooting out of the amp.

If it has some sort of speaker protection relay then you should be fine. If is functional there should be a detection circuit that will open them and ground out the signal path if something happens.

if you’re concerned you could always take it for a checkup. there’s a couple of basic things (regulators, rectifiers, power supply caps) that take the majority of electrical stress and they can be easily checked for signs of impending failure.

standard failure modes will normally be ‘pop and then silence’, sometimes accompanied by a blown fuse.

I personally have not seen this occurrence in 45 years.

Your ears will be fine.

Some (rare) catastrophic fail might occur which will destroy all/part of the output transistors and blow both tweeters and if awesome enough fry the mids…the woofs should be ok… maybe.

A long running joke is…the tweeters gave their life so the protection circuit/relay could live. 😬

I had a cap blow in an old monitor and short out, and **** me it was a loud bang.

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.

When the main power supply capacitor failed in my MA5100 it started making a 120 Hz tone at full volume. At least it didn’t hurt my speakers.

The worst case scenario ends with you in your underwear standing out in the snow on your lawn watching your house burn down while your wonder if the ringing in your ears will ever go away, and then an asteroid strikes and takes you out of your misery. Fortunately worse case scenarios virtually never happen. So, if I were you I wouldn’t sweat it. ;)