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Insider Picks publishes guides to the best Bluetooth speakers for every budget. Part of those guides is a "BI Rating," a ten-point scale aimed at providing a rough estimate of our own opinions mixed with those of other speaker reviewers across the web.
Here's how we came to those BI Ratings, and the speakers we chose in general.
Much like the process we use for our headphone guides, the speakers included on the list are neither the nine highest-scoring ones overall, nor the three highest-scoring ones for each price tier. We chose those nine based on a mixture of feedback from professional and user reviews across the web, and our own hands-on experience.
Once we narrowed our original shortlist — which consisted of a little more than 30 well-received speakers — down to nine, we then assigned them a BI Rating, which takes various sources' opinions into account.
Those sources include CNET, PCMag, TechRadar, iLounge, The Wirecutter, and technical speaker review blog Oluv's Gadgets.
We looked at many, many other speaker reviewing outlets — as well as user reviews for each device — as we made our picks, but we felt these six were knowledgeable and frequently updated enough to give us the fairest general score possible. Audio taste is always subjective, but professionals generally tend to agree when something is good or bad.
To get the numerical value for a specific speaker, we did the following:
1. Multiplied its star rating on CNET, PCMag, and/or TechRadar by two, wherever applicable.
2. Converted iLounge's letter grade scale to a numerical score, wherever applicable. An "A" is a 10, a "A-" is a 9, and so on.
3. Added our own BI Rating out of 10.
4. Took the resulting sum and divided it by the number of sources that reviewed the given speaker in the first place. The UE Roll was rated by five of the above sources (including us), for instance, so its total review score at this point in the process was divided by five.
5. Added 0.5 points to the resulting number if The Wirecutter and/or Oluv's Gadgets gave the speaker positive feedback, if applicable.
6. Rounded the new resulting number to the nearest whole number.
So, going back to the Roll, it received scores of 8 (4 x 2 from CNET), 8 (4 x 2 from PCMag), 7 (3.5 x 2 from TechRadar), 9 (A- from iLounge), and 9 (out of 10 from us). The resulting 41 was divided by 5 to get 8.2. Neither Oluv's Gadgets nor The Wirecutter have explicitly recommended it yet, so we then rounded that down to a BI Score of 8 out of 10. If they had, the resulting 8.7 (if one of the two praised it) or 9.2 (if both did) would've made us round it to a 9 out of 10.
Like any system that tries to distill personal opinion into a number, this has its flaws. Our personal score often differed from the BI Rating by a number or two, and some speakers on the list weren't formally reviewed by many sources. And it's not like we're not going to highlight any low-scoring devices in a buying guide.
However, ratings make things simple, so if we were going to have one, we wanted one that reflected the ideas of many tastes, not just our own. Again, speaker preference is mostly a subjective thing, so it seemed right to include as many insights as possible.
These buying guides are by no means static, and we plan on updating them in the future. It's likely we'll be updating our BI Rating metric as well, but for now, we hope that clears up any potential confusion. Thanks for reading.