Yes, it could very well be the case. That's why I asked about your speaker cables. It's a pain in the ass but you really should inspect them and run conduit to make your life easier next time.
I had the same thing happen to me and it was damage to one of my speaker cables. It runs under and behind our couch to a surround speaker and got pinched under a couch foot when we moved it to vacuum or something. It would play at low volumes but would go into protection when I turned it up.
I will definitely do it next time.
Currently the only option i have is to find out the damaged channel and change the wire(in my case dont use the ceiling cable and run a new cable through some were else )
But it will be a very difficult task in mycase to figure out the damaged cable because of the issue reproducing time as well as the number of channels (11).
Is there a way to find out if my speaker cable got damaged somewhere ??