[squirt]

At the risk of sounding foolish, what are Red Book CDs?..I take it they are specially recorded CDs that sound better than regular CDs or something like that?

Do these CDs play in any regular CD player?...

Are there any online places that sell Red Book CDs?

About how much do they cost?

 

[DanG]

Redbook CDs are just the normal 16-bit, 44.1-kHz CDs that you can buy in any music store.

"Scarlet Book" refers to Super Audio CD, "Yellow Book" refers to CD-ROM, "Orange Book" refers to CD-MO (magneto-optic), "Rainbow Book" refers to MD, "White Book" refers to Video CD. The variants of DVD are given six "books:" "Book A" (DVD-ROM), "Book B" (DVD-Video), "Book C" (DVD-Audio), "Book D" (DVD-Recordable), "Book E" (DVD-RAM), and "Book F" (DVD-RW). The ones I didn't know I found in Principles of Digital Audio by Ken C. Pohlmann (4th Ed., McGraw-Hill), and Magneto-Optical Recording Materials (Gambino and Suzuki, ed., IEEE). That's about all the different "books" I can think of (or want to!).

 

[squirt]

Yea, somehow i just knew i would come out sounding foolish on this one...
anyway thanks Dan

 

[ponzio]

I thought I once heard that the names of these books (or at least the Red book) were a reference to the color of the physical book created by the standard's committee (ISO or the like) for each standard. Like, as in, the cover of the book describing standard CD spec's was red in color. Is this true or am I way off?

 

[KR...]

Yes, that's true for the red one.

Don't know for sure about the rest.

 

[DanG]

Yeah, Ponzio, I think that's right. It became sort of arbitrary eventually (I doubt that the books on different kinds of DVD had "A," "B," etc. on the cover

), and I think that MiniDisc got "rainbow" because it's a combination of several different formats' technologies.