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Insider Picks publishes guides to the best available headphones. 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 headphone reviewers across the web.
Here's how we came to those BI Ratings, and the headphones we chose in general.
The exercise headphones included on the listare neither the six highest-scoring pairs overall, nor the three highest-scoring pairs for each budget level. We chose those six 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 about 20 well-received pairs — down to six, we then assigned them a BI Rating, which takes various sources' opinions into account.
Those sources include The Wirecutter, CNET, PCMag, Digital Trends, Tom's Guide, What-HiFi, Sound and Vision, and TechRadar.
We looked at many, many headphone reviewing outlets — as well as enthusiast sites like Head-Fi— but we felt these eight were knowledgeable and frequently updated enough to give us a good idea of what's worth considering. Headphone taste is always subjective, but professionals generally tend to agree when something is good or bad.
To get the numerical value for a specific pair of headphones, we did the following:
1. Multiplied its star rating on CNET, PCMag, Digital Trends, What-HiFi, and/or TechRadar by two, wherever applicable.
2. Added Tom's Guide's rating out of 10, if applicable.
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 pair of headphones in the first place. The Plantronics Backbeat Fit 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 Sound and Vision gave the headphones positive feedback, if applicable.
6. Rounded the new resulting number to the nearest whole number.
So, going back to the Plantronics, the Backbeat Fit received scores of 8 (4 x 2 from CNET), 8 (4 x 2 from PCMag), 6 (3 x 2 from TechRadar), 7 (out of 10 from Tom's Guide), and 8 (out of 10 from us). The resulting 37 was divided by 5 to get 7.4. Wirecutter gave it a positive writeup, so we added 0.5 to get 7.9. Rounding that down then got us the BI Rating of 8 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 headphones on the list weren't formally reviewed by many sources. And it's not like we're not going to highlight many low-scoring devices in a buying guide.
However, ratings simplify things, so if we were going to have one, we wanted one that reflected the ideas of many tastes, not just our own. Again, headphone 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.