I know several people have created mp3's at 320 kbps and compared them to flac files and have not been able to notice a difference. I never really did a side by side comparison, but since I have plenty of hard drive space and my denon plays flac over my network, i decided to store all of my music as flac anyway.

as far as specifics on mp3 ripping maybe someone else can chime in since I ripped all of my music to flac.

-David