The MP3 quality rendered by different "rippers" varies drastically. I consider myself pretty picky when it comes to my portable MP3 collection. I have used many of the rippers for Windows and found a program that works perfectly for me. It's actually two programs. The first one is "Exact Audio Copy". This program reads the disc information and copies an exact image of the tracks to your hard drive. The second program is called LAME. LAME takes the .WAV file from the hard drive and encodes to .MP3. You can set up EAC to launch LAME so the whole process only takes a few mouse clicks. I use variable bitrate presets called "standard" and "extreme" that work on most modern CD players including my iPod. I think that "Extreme" sounds just as good as the original. There are two web pages that explain this in greater detail if you are interested. Sorry Ken, these are Windows only for now. Here are some links.
http://mp3.radified.com/
http://www.chrismyden.com/nuke/modules.php?op=modload&name=MP3DB&file=painless
Oh yea, I forgot to include the best part. These programs are FREE!
