I have USEPIPES=y in my .abcde config which breaks the ripping process. cdparanoia seems to output the data to stdout but stdout doesn't seem to be piped to the encoding process. Haven't used abcde in a while so I'm not sure which version introduced the breakage. Anyhow, USEPIPES should either be fixed or the config option should be ignored.
In abcde, version 2.5.3-1, I provoked this bug using only command line options (i.e. no modifications to any config files). For example, the command abcde -o mp3 -P -q low floods the terminal with binary data.
I believe that the USEPIPES option has been fixed upstream: http://git.einval.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=abcde.git;a=summary but it would be great to have this tested... Andrew