I have a circuit board from a car stereo amplifier. My vehicle uses an
amp for each speaker, and this particular amp is well known for having
electrolytic capacitors that go bad. I would like to replace the
capacitors, but the caps in the middle of the board, and the adjacent
inductors were partly covered with an amber colored transparent,
slightly soft potting. I was able to remove enough of it without doing
any damage (except to a couple of the capacitors I will be replacing)
but I'd like to have an idea of what to replace the potting with.

The amp board itself gets enclosed in a shield that acts as a heat sink
for the transistors, which are not near the potting, and the entire
shielded amp goes in a sealed enclosure that also contains the speaker.
So it's pretty isolated from outside environmental factors, and I don't
know enough about this to know what effect the potting has on thermal
issues or anything else, or even why it's needed. It seemed to have
been applied somewhat haphazardly, covering the inductors about half
way each, and burying some of the capacitors part way, and filling some
of the space between them.

Is there some general explanation of why potting would typically be
used here and what I should look for?