SafeAudio CDs and sound quality in OS X: a concern?

Zach Pincus expresses concern about what may become a problem with how OS X deals with audio, and how that interacts with Macrovision's SafeAudio CD copy protection. [SafeAudio is a scheme recently deployed on some CD's released in California. If the test works, the effort will be scaled up. See this slashdot.com article and this MacFixIt item for more info.] Zach doesn't have hard data yet to support his concern, but it still seemed worth noting. The item also contains some useful background info. Zach writes:

The problem is that the copy-protection may render audio CD's unplayable, or terrible-sounding when played under OS X. To fully appreciate the problem, you need to understand how SafeAudio works, as well as how OS X deals with CD audio:

OS X's handling of audio CD data OS X does not utilize the CD-ROM's analog audio-out port. Instead data is read in digitally to the OS, which then reassembles it and passes it to whatever app is requesting the stream. What the digital approach loses is the hardware error compensation that the analog audio-out will have. If there's a scratch on an audio CD, the analog hardware will correctly smooth that over. But if there's one on a data CD, you don't want that smoothed over. So OS X has to implement a software "smoothing" system for the digital audio data. And, as users of low-end older Macs know, it's not too good: dusty audio CDs that play OK in OS 9 can sound terrible in OS X. Newer Macs handle this better. However, here is where the SafeAudio Copy Protection comes in.

Macrovision's SafeAudio SafeAudio works by corrupting (intentionally) some of the checksums for CD audio (see this article for more info). Basically it introduces static into the sound which will be smoothed out by the analog hardware - but not by digital transfer, which will choke on a CD with bad checksums.

The good news is that the CD drive hardware has "burst copy mode" which seems to not choke on the problematic checksums (see this article). However, even if OS X uses this mode to transfer the audio streams, there is still the problem that they are riddled with errors. Will OS X's primitive audio-smoothing be able to compensate for this? Or will OS X not even be able to properly play copy-protected CD's, much less "rip, mix, burn" them?

I don't have such a protected CD on hand to try out. But if someone can provide more feedback on this, I would welcome it."

Update: Thomas Koons notes that the Mac itself is not needed to 'decode' or 'read' audio from a CD: "In fact most CD-ROM drives can play an audio disc without a computer. They just need power and speakers attached if they have the controls for this on the front face plate."