Can you "crash" hifi?

Please excuse my technical ignorance but I've always assumed you should put equipment to standby before flicking the switch at the wall but I'm not actually sure why..

Two reasons why I bring this up,

Firstly, my house-mate sat on the remote for the sockets once thus cutting the power to everything (they are inaccessible so I use radio-controlled plug socket), I heard a 'pop' as the power went, is this damaging to hifi?

Secondly, the power switch on my subwoofer does not function correctly, it is either ON or in AUTO (goes to standby after 5 mins) but I can't manually switch it to standby straight away. Should I let it go to standby first before turning everything off, even with the amp off and no signal passing through?

Thanks.

 

Some kit does have an intelligent stand-by and start-up sequence so i guess you could potentially crash these microprocessor driven systems.
If it does happen, powering down completely at the wall socket and starting up normally should sort things.

 

The pop you hear is likely not to damage the equipment, but your speakers might not like it, if it is very loud.

 

Just out of interest, what is it that would have caused the pop when the power was cut during playback? I assume it was something discharging?

 

psu caps?