If the earphone and the amp are plugged and unplugged without cutting off the power, the earphone and the amp will not be damaged. As long as the earphone and the amp are not aged and the quality is not very poor, the starting current will not affect the earphone and the amp.
Unless you can hear a strong sonic boom when plugging and unplugging headphones, or the computer headset interface has a strong static electricity, the headphones will not be damaged due to hot plugging, and this phenomenon can only be encountered if the motherboard of the current computer is broken.
Extended data
The amplifier has two main functions, rectification and amplification. The above is mainly about the function of amplification, so I will talk about the rectifier function of amplifier. As the name implies, rectification is to shape the waveform of analog electrical signal converted by DAC to reduce the distortion of the original signal.
This step can effectively reduce the fundamental distortion in the original signal (that is, the digital taste we often say) and make the sound more natural and pleasant.
We often hear some friends say that so-and-so amp tastes good, so how did this statement come from? In fact, the "taste" here mainly comes from the change of the original analog signal waveform in the rectifier part of the amplifier.
On the one hand, the overall frequency response curve of headphones can be changed by changing the waveform, which makes it more in line with people's listening preferences.
On the other hand, signal amplification will inevitably bring some distortion, because if the power amplifier brings some even harmonic distortion, it will also have a positive effect on the sense of hearing and make the sound more "analog". For example, walkman with Cardinals dives deeper at low frequencies and the human voice becomes more poisonous. This change of sound waveform is the rectification of amplifier.