How the Gear Score works
The Gear Score on gear pages is a 0–100 blend of customer-rating aggregates — the average star rating and review count that major pro-audio retailers publish on their own product pages. Think of it as a metacritic for rack gear: one number that summarizes how buyers across several shops rate a product.
Where the numbers come from
Roughly monthly, we capture each retailer’s published rating average and count for the products in our catalog — from Thomann, Guitar Center, Musician’s Friend, zZounds, Sweetwater, and B&H Photo Video. Where a retailer’s pages can’t be read directly, an AI search assistant estimates the aggregate from public search results; those rows are labeled est. (AI) and a score built only from estimates says so.
IEM Rig does not host or reproduce these reviews. We store only the two published facts — average and count — and every row links you to the retailer’s own review page to read the actual words.
The formula
- Each source’s rating is normalized to 0–100 (a 4.9 on a 5-star scale → 98).
- Sources are blended with a volume weight of log10(1 + count), so a shop with 691 ratings outweighs — but can’t completely drown — one with 16.
- The blend is shrunk toward a category prior of 88 using score = (N/(N+25))·R + (25/(N+25))·88, where N is the pooled rating count — the same idea IMDb uses, so two 5-star reviews can’t produce a perfect 100.
- A headline score appears only with at least 10 pooled ratings across at least 2 shops; below that we show the per-shop rows alone.
- Captures older than 60 days drop out until the next monthly refresh.
Honest limitations
- Aggregates carry no per-review dates, so we can’t weight recent reviews more heavily — freshness is enforced at the capture level instead.
- Retailer numbers can lag or differ from what you see live; treat the score as a strong signal, not gospel.
- The score never feeds search-engine markup — it’s here for you, not for SEO.
Questions, corrections, or a retailer who’d like their data removed: get in touch via the planner’s feedback link.