21 year old AV receiver - waiting for the end?

Techs won’t touch them because of two main reasons:

(1) Replacement Parts are unavailable and the only possible source is Frankesteining from another old sold-for-parts unit , if even possible.. In your very old model case, it’s a Hail Mary case, at best. Techs intuitively won’t invest valuable time to source this.

(2) The costs to potentially fix it invokes a further not insignificant labour cost . In the end, their final parts and labour and taxes invoice to you will grossly exceed its FMV. Techs prior experience in resulting bad debts risk predicates a hard “pass” from the get-go.

TAKEAWAY

Your AVR has run its useful life and it’s an embryonic boat anchor in the making. Don’t throw more money at it. It’s going to die at some point, so it’s time to move on…full stop

Kind of depends, but caps going out can cause a cascade of failures. Of all the parts in your receiver, the caps are the easiest to find appropriate replacements for. It’s anything made out of silicon which can fail and have no replacement for. Transistors, CPUs, movie sound processing, etc.

Transistors are kind of iffy, depending on the parts originally used, they can go out of manufacture and have no reasonable replacement.

IMHO, having the unit recapped is a reasonable effort and will probably save you problems down the road. I think reaching out to a shop and being clear that you just want the power caps replaced should get you further along. Modern caps are smaller, longer lived and higher temp (longer endurance). Finding appropriate replacements even for 40 year old gear solid state gear should be reasonably easy.

Looking at a picture of the insides, the power supply layout is pretty traditional. 4 large caps right next to the large power transformer.  These would be easy to replace.

Another thing to consider is that caps made in the 21st century are a lot better than made in the 1980s. You may have more life in them than you’d have thought otherwise.

Thanks. I'm probably not going to put effort or money into it, but I can't help anthropomorphize it a bit - it has been faithful member of the household for two decades.

If you use it almost every day and considering its age I’d recommend leaving it on 24/7 — unless you’re leaving home for several days — rather than constantly turning it on and off almost every day (if that’s what you’re doing).  And I agree you should not sink one dime into servicing it and put any of those $$$ toward a new AVR instead.  Hope it continues to soldier on for you though!

Open your wallet and get something new and better. It won't hurt too much.