@neauoire @bd butting in but my recommendations are some combination of

(1) don't use headphones; use speakers.
(2) use headphones that hang off your head, not earbuds. Remove them from your ears before trying any audio code for the first time.
(3) Instead of listening to the program output at all, have the program output to a file, either a wav or raw audio you open as such in audacity (it is nice to double to a file anyway). Look at the waveform before you listen ("bad" waveforms are visible)

@neauoire @bd haha made me remember some pure data tutorials I saw on youtube, author was insisting that you should never try to make your own reverb from scratch, because it is too dangerous for your health.

@neauoire @bd Something I didn't see mentioned here that you probably already know. When I do such audio dev or mess with max I always clip the signal between [-0.9,0.9] it saved me a few times. Also using speakers is very important to me in early prototyping phases.

@neauoire @bd You can always pop a hardware limiter on your headphones.