All AC97 compliant soundcards upsample to 48kHZ for playback. When you rip a cd, you are not playing the cd and no upsampling occurs. The tracks remain at 44.1kHZ.
No cd burning programs can work with 48kHZ nor for that matter any cd players. The cd spec requires 44.1kHZ/16 bit and that is exactly what you get when you rip a cd, regardless of what program you use to do it.
If the wav files sound distorted, it is likely the 'hi-fi link' device that was mentioned. Streaming 1.4Mbps off a hard drive is absolutely trivial for even a highly fragmented drive. Look to the playback chain for the cause of your problems, not the wav files on the hard disk.