Red Book CD's. What does it mean?

The "Red Book" specifications apply to your run-of-the mill CD. They are standards that tell pressing plants how thick a CD should be, how much playing time (this is somewhat flexible), etc. so all CD's will play in all CD players. These standards were developed by Sony/Philips companies. Sony is nervous about the new DVD-A standard because they won't be able to collect royalties (as they do on regular CD's) because DVD-A doesn't use "Red Book" standards.

The red book also describes the protocol of the CD. This tells the hardware how to interpret the data on the CD. Although the Red Book standard may have been high tech 20 years ago, it's not very robust buy today's standards and based on some of my testing, not adhered to when it comes to the number of allowable read errors.