kanewolf :
There are two factors, what ripping software and what format/compression. You can use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) -- http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ for ripping and a lossless codec like FLAC in an MP3 format -- https://xiph.org/flac/ .
This. Use Exact Audio Copy, not something like Windows Media Center. Music CDs are encoded with a metric ton of error correction. That's why you can scratch it up and it'll still play perfectly. Unfortunately, the vast majority of CD playing (and ripping) software ignores all of this and relies on Windows to read the data off the CD cleanly. Windows treats the CD as a filesystem, and if it encounters errors, it tries to read it again a few more times, then gives up and tells you there's an error.
EAC gets the raw datastream read from the CD (if your CD reader allows it), giving it access to the pre-error corrected data. If it encounters an error that the error correction can't fix, it plays around with this raw data stream, trying to read it different ways in order to get a clean read. It has recovered clean rips off of CDs which wouldn't even play in my best audio CD player anymore.
Most rippers will default to WAV, which is a lossless format native to Windows. It doesn't have very good compression though (actually I don't think it has any compression), which is why most audiophiles convert it to FLAC, which is losses and will give you about a 2:1 compression ratio over WAV. The lossy formats of course get better compression ratios. But if the point of all this is to backup your CD collection, then you want your primary backup to be lossless.