Alex,
From what I gather from reading the material on the net, CD Audio does indeed have error correction built into it. However, most cd ripping programs just read the digital information from the audio disk without attempting to use any form of error correction.
That's why you would use a program like Exact Audio Copy http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/, which does attempt to do error correcting. This way you have a wave file which is much closer to the original form from the cd.

As for which bitrate is good for you, I agree that it's a personal choice. I must say though that after reading the comparison above, and also at http://www.r3mix.net, I decided to play with variable bitrate compression.

When compressing Tom Sawyer from the remastered Moving Pictures, I told LAME to use VBR at the highest bitrate. At one point in the intro to the song, the bitrate for a frame went as high as 320kbs, so I figure if I were to limit it to 128kbs, I would be missing a whole lot of info. Unfortunately, I'm nowhere near my home audio equipment, so I can't do a good listening test.

Even without listening to it on a good system, I could still tell the difference between a 128k encoded file and a VBR file at highest setting, even though the file sizes were so close that the difference is not even worth mentioning.

Just adding my 2 cents to the whole discussion.

-Trevor