mp2 to mp3 conversion

[musik]

I´m living in Germany and here in Europe we have hundreds of satellite-stations sending in DVB-standard (digital video broadcasting). That is not only video, also radio-programs are sent with interesting music. The format is Mpeg 1 layer 2 (mp2). Most stations are using 48000 kHz, 192 kbps, channel-mode Stereo, encoded by Lame. Some are in higher quality with 256 kbps, a few with Joint Stereo.
I´d like to burn this music an CD and play it on DVD-, CD- or mp3-player, connected to my hifi-equipment, but that is not quite simple.
Most players do not accept .mp2-format, some do, after renaming the files to .mp3, but not all.
now I bought the dBpowerAmp 11.0 and tried to convert from .mp2 to .mp3, but that is a very time consuming job: with my Intel Pentium 4, 3,0 GHz PC I needed about 30 minutes for about 68 minutes of music. The same files are converted to wave-format within 6 minutes!
I suppose that the mp3-format is rather similar to the mp2-format (otherwise renaming couldn´t work). Is that correct???
If so it should be possible to have a very fast but high quality converter which uses automatically the same bitrate and channel-mode of the original mp2-file. The quality of the mp3-file should be the same as of the mp2-file. I think it cannot be better after any conversion.

In Europe a lot of users would be glad to have such a tool.