| About Us Section - About Us Home Page | | | 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 section. | 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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