This might well have been discussed before, but I haven't found anything and, anyway, I would like to know latest impressions and opinions about it.

Which are the best ogg setting to encode classical music, mostly chamber music but also keyboard, opera and sinfonies.

I usually use VBR 160, sometimes 190, with results I judge good... but I would very much appreciate to hear opinions of people more informed and experienced than me, for what looks good today may not looks so good tomorrow...

Thanks.

What's the target listening environment, how good are your ears, how sensitive are you as a listener, how much do you care, etc....

Best bet is to experiment and pick what does the trick for _you_.

I understand what you mean, and you're surely right, but there also should be some general criteria according to the kind of music...

Let's face reality, I am no audiophile, I have not a music studio, I am just another bum who probably won't listen to music in a different way than a portable audio player or from a pair of computer speaker... still, when I rip I would like to use what has proven to be best for the kind of thing I like to hear... maybe one day I will sell my car and buy an expensive hi-fi stereo to play my music collection who knows...

For this reasons, I experimented but I guess this could be good for what I am doing now and for the things I am using right now, at home, but what about the future or playing those same files elsewhere, with different hardward, f.i. at my office where I could buy better hw? I think experimenting could be useful but not everything.

Am I wrong?

Not really - Vorbis' quality level ensures that you don't have to worry about what you are encoding to get good results (in general, of course there can and will be exceptions)

I wouldn't go over -q6, so probably -q5 or -q6 will give nice results no matter what circumstances. Many people will be fine with -q4 or even less as well.

Better -q6 with vorbis 1.0
Background noise is often audible with -q5

I suppose this minus q 4 or 5 or 6 stuff is related to the console mode vorbis encoder, while I have no way to see this kind of thing inside dbpoweramp, the ripper - encoder I usually use for this purpose...

Could this -q6 thing be expressed in some kbps - VBR or ABR or else terms? Or is it a completely different set of values? Is there a "conversion table" between the "q" things and the traditional way to express quality and structure of an audio file?

Thanks again to everybody.

Sure. -q6 is a short way of saying --quality 6, which in turn means "VBR Quality 6 on a scale of 0 to 10". (The scale has since expanded to -1 to 10. Shades of Spinal Tap: "This one goes to ELEVEN!")

Note that quality can be non-integer numbers (3.5, 4.9, 6.23, whatever).

VBR Quality 3 tends to be near 112kbps.
VBR Quality 4 tends to be near 128kbps.
VBR Quality 5 tends to be near 160kbps.
VBR Quality 6 tends to be near 192kbps.

Qualities in between can be guessed from the above.

If your encoder does not support a VBR quality setting, and insists on making you think in bitrates, I recommend you get a better encoder.

-q4 = 128 kbps (average)
-q5 = 160 kbps (average)
-q6 = 192 kbps (average)

With classical music, bitrate is often lower than expected. But in some case higher (I have in mind a complex instrument like harpsichord).

There is a small jump between -q 5.99 and -q6 (around 10 kbps difference). I advice you to encode your classical at -q6, and not less. Even if quality good enough is with -q5.99 (or maybe -q3), ABXing the noise problem with vorbis 1.0 is not really hard, and sometimes easy. You can also take a look for the Garf tuned version, based on the old RC2 codec called GT2). Quality is better than final version for pre-echo and noise (but maybe not all the time).