What are redbook CD's?

Tony, Redbook CDs are nothing more than the standard CDs we all use. The term 'Redbook' refers to the original guidelines for the format, which were, as I understand it, published in a red book. So, CDs at Best Buy, Circuit City, Tower Records, etc., are Redbook CDs. A recent exception are CDs that employ copy protection technology. Copy protection was not included in the CD standard (Redbook), and Philips, a co-inventor of the CD format with Sony, stated that copy-protected CDs are actually not CDs. It has been said by others here that the copy-protected CD of Celine Dion's A New Day Has Come being sold in Europe does not carry the CD logo.

 

Red Book from http://whatis.techtarget.com/definit...503642,00.html
The Red Book is the 1980 document that provides the specifications for the standard compact disc (CD) developed by Sony and Philips. According to legend, the document was in a binder with red covers, originating the tradition for subsequent adaptations of CD specifications to be referred to as variously colored books. The Red Book described the CD's physical specifications, such as the tracks, sector and block layout, coding, and sampling. Sony and Philips referred to the discs as CD-DA (digital audio), defined as a content medium for audio data digitized at 44,100 samples per second (44.1KHz) and in a range of 65,536 possible values (16 bits).
The CD Format
According to Red Book specifications, a standard CD is 120 mm (4.75 inches) in diameter and 1.2 mm (0.05 inches) thick and is composed of a polycarbonate plastic substrate (underlayer - this is the main body of the disc), one or more thin reflective metal (usually aluminum) layers, and a lacquer coating. CDs are divided into a lead-in area, which contains the table of contents (TOC), a program area, which contains the audio data, and a lead-out area, which contains no data. An audio CD can hold up to 74 minutes of recorded sound, and up to 99 separate tracks. Data on a CD-DA is organized into sectors (the smallest possible separately addressable block) of information. The audio information is stored in frames of 1/75 second length. 44,100 16-bit samples per second are stored, and there are two channels (left and right). This gives a sector size of 2,352 bytes per frame, which is the total size of a physical block on a CD.
CD data is not arranged in distinct physical units; data is organized into frames (consisting of 24 bytes of user data, plus synchronization, error correction, and control and display bits) which are intricately interleaved so that damage to the disc will not destroy any single frame, but only small parts of many frames.
The Red Book specifications form the basis for all later CD technologies.