On Sat, 17 Oct 2015, Takashi Iwai wrote:
I won't say that we can always save the world. But there is certainly a room for improvement for a little bit more safety than now. At least, if hardware manufacturer or system integrator already knows the dangerous part, we should provide some easy way to paper over it.
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).
My point is really that it might be a good idea to get some idea of the potential failure modes before introducing a mechanism to protect us from them.
/Ricard