A big risk with audio hardware is that buggy os drivers might lead to noise being output. One can attempt to detect and block this in hardware, but a compressed

A big risk with audio hardware is that buggy os drivers might lead to noise being output. One can attempt to detect and block this in hardware, but a compressed EDM track with reduced dynamics can look pretty close to loud noise at some short moments. Now let's say you have a high power Amp configured correctly for mixing a -24db classical music recording and then the OS glitches out and you hear 0db noise. That might blow up your speakers, headphones, or even worse, your ears. My experience writing kernel drivers for audio software is that Windows will accept the click sound and then stop processing if the buffer runs dry. OS X used to have issues that it'll continue playing, meaning it'll reinterpret random memory as sound. Not sure if that was fixed in recent Mac versions, as their approach does have memory & performance benefits. But it means that audio driver glitches on Mac can be physically painful for the user.