When ripping songs from CDs, I like to use EAC which is Exact Audio Copy, its a fantastic program that is absolutely free and OpenSource which is great.
it gets songs at around 320kbps which I believe the quality of most music CDs; it will 1st rip it as a .wav or .wma file which are huge, but it'll then reduce down to a very good .mp3 file which sounds crystal clear.
I've never really noticed too much of difference between the quality of the songs until I listened to songs that I ripped off with EAC, you tend to notice the smaller things in your music, everything seems to come out better.
My suggestion is to try out different ripping programs for yourself, I've tried Winamp, Realplayer, Windows Media Player, iTunes, and I've finally been satisfied with Exact Audio Copy.
Here a link to a guide that tells you how to set up and install everything for EAC to work properly.
LINK:
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/arch...deneaclame.cfm