In general (talking about digital audio)
WAV (Or an uncompressed format) is always going to be higher quality than anything compressed (mp3)
However, inside of compressed audio there are different qualities. The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality.
In uncompressed audio you also have a similar quality difference. The higher the bit-depth and sample rate, the higher the quality.
There is one exception to that rule with uncompressed audio though (and it is rare) and that is when the bit-depth is very low (for example a bit depth of 2) but the sample rate is through the roof (5MHz) is as close to the best quality possible. But again, recordings using that is very rare.