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About Us Section - About Us Home Page |
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Welcome to StereoManuals.com, a business owned and operated by Stout
and Associates. We are located in
Parkersburg,
West Virginia (USA) in the
Mid-Ohio (River) Valley. My name is Rick Stout and I am the primary
person behind the various activities of Stout and Associates since the early
1980's. These activities have varied over the years beginning with insurance
and securities work in the 1980s and early 1990s. That phase diminished
and morphed into property management, computer sales/repair and miscellaneous
activities during the balance of the 1990s. Near the turn of the century,
life was still 'movin' on' and we found ourselves getting involved in rental
real estate in a small way. And with that, the groundwork was being laid
for our current main activity which is StereoManuals.
We began by selling only 2 manuals on eBay in March 2001 and it was
two months before we offered a third item. A year later we were arguably
the most successful audio manuals seller on eBay even though offering only
a few hundred popular manuals. In late fall of that year, we stopped selling
on eBay and began trying to develop a website that was originally intended
to be what we we supposed would be just a small addition to eBay. In January
of 2003, Google indexed our site and we immediately began receiving more
emails than we could handle. Four months later, we unexpectedly grew to
about 50,000 items (at the time, a staggering number). From then till now,
it has certainly been a laborious and frustrating experience (and often
a comedy of errors) trying to make it all available for you to purchase.
Much more information about this is recorded in the Current Announcements
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We are a small family owned
and operated business, not a multi-national corporation. That brings
both blessings and curses. Curses in not being financially able to just
'make things happen NOW. And certainly blessings in not having to report
to anyone and not having to live under all the modern rules of political
correctness.
Our method of doing business is based on old-fashioned principles of trying
our very best to do what's right and trying to treat people the same way
we would like to be treated. To us, that means accepting everyone as a friend
and assuming everyone wants to treat us the same. Naturally some of you
don't care about things like that as long as we are 'business-like' and
efficient. Thankfully, the vast majority of folks who contact us are very
appreciative of ours efforts in building this business.
We have been making plans for quite some time to tremendously expand
this website. Besides offering some of the finest quality classic audio
literature reproductions available, we wish to turn this site into a major
source of information for fans of classic audio gear. A large amount of
material and information is already gathered for the project and when time
allows, we will begin adding first a little, then *a lot* of information
to the Reference Section.
Our primarily business purpose is to provide genuinely high quality reproduction
audio manuals for owners of vintage /classic audio gear. See
Manuals/Stuff For Sale for further information.
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