iTunes has an option to enable error correction. Presumably, this is meant to be used with scratched discs. But would it introduce artifacts when used with clean discs?

Should it only be enabled when necessary? I don't mind that it takes longer to import with error correction.

It wont do any harm on fine discs, ofcourse. Some drives has problems with the error correction in iTunes (for example my Plextor PX-W4824A), it reads at only 0,1-0,3x, and constantly spins up/down. So whenever i decide to rip with iTunes, i just rip the CD with EAC first, to a wav+cue, and mount this with Daemon-Tools, and then rip perfectly with iTunes.

Thanks. Do you think that the iTunes error correction performs the same correction as a typical CD player? Or is there some kind of additional process being added?

Apple doesn't provide much documentation for this option.

I have no idea how good the error correction in iTunes works, since i can't test it with my drive. Maybe someone else have tested it? But not as i've heard of..

Cool. I'm not an isolate beast.
With my liteon DVD 166S, same thing happened. The funniest thing is that the ripping is good for trash on damaged tracks. A lot of samples are missing (silent parts during 5 seconds replacing music!).
It's the worse ripping engine I never seen. At least with my liteon drives (a 24x burner have the same proble), and apparently with Plextor drives too.

Well, I've begun using it for all my rips and it performs at about 15x on 192kbps AAC.
One CD that would never play perfectly on any cd-player resulted in a perfect encoding, so I can recommend it

In my own experience, the "error correction" option in iTunes doesn't really do much at all. Normally, even on very scratched discs, my Powerbook's internal Matshita combo drive never fails, so I have never needed to use the error correction option while using that drive. However, on my firewire DVD+/-RW drive (Optorite DD202 (?)), I get many glitches and pops while ripping bad discs in burst mode (i.e., iTunes). For this drive, the error correction feature doesn't make any difference at all...it slows down a couple of X, but the resulting AIFF is just as bad as if it were not enabled. Thus, I compiled an OS X binary of cdparanoia, and this works much better. As always, YMMV.

My guess is that iTunes "error correction" uses some sort of jitter correction or maybe even C2 data (which might explain why it didn't work with my DVD+RW, a drive that does not return accurate C2 error data), but not the same routines as EAC or cdparanoia.

I once borrowed a very scratched CD from the library, and encoded it with iTunes. Using error correction resulted in less obvious clicks, but they were still there. I've borrowed it again, and I hope to be able to get a good copy with EAC, but it seems to give up.