fomats such as mp3, wma, AAC, flac, mp4, and ape are all COMPRESSED formats of audio. wave and aiff are uncompressed formats. so if you want to convert your wave files to mp3, you are going to end up with a compressed file.
the good news is that compression technology has advanced in the last few years. but first let me back up to the CD ripping part. if you plan on ripping your CD collection to your computer, I HIGHLY recommend you use a program called EAC (exact audio copy). It is THE best ripper there is, period. Thats not opinion, its fact. Others try to imitate it, but there's only one true real ripper out there. Besides being free, it has way advanced ripping and drive controls, and is the only ripper that can do a 100% accurate rip.
For encoding, the best mp3 encoder is LAME (also free). When using VBR (variable bitrate) settings, you can create the best mp3s possible, and are very close to CD quality.
We have a guide here on how to install, setup, and use EAC and LAME. The LAME plugin runs directly from EAC, so once you have the program configured, all you have to do is pop in the CD, it will automatically connect to the freedB to get artist/track info for the mp3 tag, and will rip and then encode to mp3 in one step.
You can find the link to the guide in my sig below...have fun
