I had a guy bring a stereo receiver in for service. On pickup he was visibly annoyed because: "I'm an Electrical Engineer and they should have replaced an IC". He was very unhappy. One could have replaced every IC in the unit and it would still not work.

This was a power supply issue and there were no IC's in this power supply. There was no point throwing an IC at this application that could be accomplished with a few cents worth of transistor. The real issue was hidden cold solder joints on the power supply board and a disagreement between a transistor and its heatsink compound. The correct repair was: replace that transistor, replace the heatsink compound, and cleanup those trash solder joints. Just about every sample of this model would eventually fail in this manor and those that were (correctly) fixed are probably still working. Even if the unit had not yet failed, one would make this repair if the unit came in for any reason.