If you're actually "ripping" (DAE - Digital Audio Extraction) from CD, then there should be zero hiss or other noise if your rip is being done properly on good equipment.

If you're talking about sampling or digitizing (taking an analog source, like tape or external CD player, and connecting it to your sound card), then there are many factors that can introduce/eleminate noise.

For DAE your best bet is to start from the most basic component, the CDROM drive. There are many opinions, but the facts are that no one makes a better drive for DAE than Plextor. No other manufacturer can claim DAE speeds as high and jitter correction or the same level of compatibility with the largest number of CDs.

Next, if you are going to be extremely anal about getting absolutely the perfect rip on the very first try, then you'll want to use a piece of software that allows "secure" ripping. Your primary choice for windows is EAC (Exact Audio Copy). For Linux, CD-Paranoia as far as I can remember. EAC will rip the same sectors over and over to ensure a perfect copy (read the EAC site for fairly detailed information).

AudioGrabber doesn't have a secure mode, but it's a very capable ripper with a great interface.

I'll let someone else cover analog-to-digital recording (digitizing) - AudioGrabber supports this too (and can use some noise filtering plugins).

The encoder you choose will have no effect on the quality of your rip. But it's possible (and easy) to turn a perfect rip into a crappy-sounding MP3 file. That's a whole other thread though.

Bruno