Will static noise from hurt your headphones?

It doesn't, it's not really any different then any other sound. Don't worry.

As long as it's not hard clipping your audio, no it won't. Hard clipping can destroy a speaker because of the abrupt signal changes under power, like turning a radio up so loud it distorts. I skype with my 880's all the time and all is well.

Hard clipping is what solid state amplifiers do when they run out of headroom. If you looked at it on an oscilliscope it would look like a square wave, because all of the peaks are being cut off hard. One of the reason tube amps are so valued is that they 'soft clip'. There is still distortion when over driven but it's much gentler.

 

Hard clipping a speaker is kind of like sending it a distorted square wave all on or all off with little in between, very hard on a driver. I've driven 50watt speakers at 110watts and never blown one as long as I didn't let it distort. But DJ'd at a party once and let others mess with the controls and I blew a woofer on 150watt speakers that were being driven with a 100 watt amp.

 

What can wreck a speaker over long term is heat. Especially in tweeters that are driven hard, they have to move the voice coils so fast that friction and heat from the voice coil itself will begin to break down the smooth frictionless environment and if the speaker should begin to catch it could blow the voice coil from the sudden rise in resistance. Power into resistance = heat. flash, dead speaker.

Edited by Kodhifi - 1/9/13 at 8:14pm

lol me too

+1 to all of this. Especially when talking about speakers.


Basically if you're trying to turn stuff up louder than your amplifier can provide, the amplifier starts distorting, here's the Wikipedia page (and it has pictures):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(audio)
And here's a great in-depth article on it:
http://sound.westhost.com/clipping.htm

Generally headphones can take substantial input relative to the output levels we want, so killing them with clipping is *extremely* rare (you have a better chance of doing it with DC or by abusing them physically); the M50 are rated to take upwards of 1W/ch, and normal listening levels will be <.1mW/ch. Most amplifiers (and you actually are using an amplifier, even if it's built into something like a phone or mp3 player) output less than their maximum input as well (and things would be way too loud for you to tolerate before you got to that point anyways). I'm not saying "impossible" but basically to recreate this with a headphone, you'd need to set up conditions to do it, normal usage is very unlikely to accomplish this unless you're hooking them up to experimental amplifiers.

The random pops and static interference you get from VOIP or similar is probably more of an annoyance to you than it is a risk to the headphones or anything else, as you're still unlikely to be pushing them anywhere near their max input power.

OP, you have nothing to worry about. The static you hear from a mic cutting in and out should have no effect long term on your headphones.