On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 08:41:42AM +0200, Ricard Wanderlof wrote:

> Is there any form of statistics on more precisely what type of failures in 
> this area occur in the real world? Speakers have been mentioned (and I 
> think were the original issue that started the discussion) and are a clear 
> case. One could imagine output stages being overdriven (even with no load) 
> in some way, or mismatched signal levels which could cause an opamp to 
> fail for instance. But have any such cases been reported? It would seem 
> very hard to diagnose for one thing, unless a hardware manufacturer 
> explicitly noted it in some documentation (which I suspect would be very 
> unlikely for say a motherboard or sound card manufacturer).

Speaker related issues are overwhelmingly the most common thing here,
either straight burnout due to overdriving or mechanical damage caused
by vibrations.