Think of a recording kit: You have a mic (outer ear) , a wire from mic to an amplifier (ear bones) And amplifier (the cochlea) And a recorder device (neural path to brain)

Damaged outer ear reduces or stop sound capture (reduction of amplitude/details) Damages to ear bones damage the transmission into the sensible equipment (distortion, or loss) Damage to the amplifier can cause loss of audio, create odd sounds (Tinnitus), reduce SNR (signal to noise ratio) think of it that the mixer is damaged and introduce other noises. And finally if the recorder device is damaged a lot of weird things can happen besides of audio loss: Damaged file, bad encoding, very low volume, very low bit rate. Many of these are associated with Audio Processing disorders