OK, so you need some CD duplication. If you have spent any time locating a CD>, you may have come across terms you haven't heard before. Often you may know the individual words and be unclear as to how that applies to what you think you need.

All CD duplication projects are done on Red Book standard audio media.

So what is the Red Book of audio, what are the media standards it has set, and why is it so important? Certain standards are required from CD duplicators and replicators when discs are produced so that they will play on audio CD players. There are 9 sets of standards, called the Rainbow Books because each disc format has a separate set of functions that it must do.

The Red Book provides the standards for audio CDs, also known as CDDA (or Compact Disc Digital Audio). There are also Yellow, Orange, White, Blue, Beige, Green, Purple, and Scarlet books in the Rainbow Book set.

These different colored books provide audio standards for:

Yellow - CD-ROM and CD-ROM XA

Orange - CD-R and CD-RW

White - Video CD

Blue - Enhanced CD, CD+G, and CD-Plus

Beige - Photo CD Green -

CD-I (Interactive)

Purple - DDCD (Double Density Compact Disc)

Scarlet - SACD (Super Audio CD)

As it relates to an audio CD, Red Book standards dictate that a standard CD is 120mm in diameter and that is is 1.2mm thick and that its made from polycarbonate plastic and that it also has thin layers of an aluminum coating and then a final lacquer coating on top of that. The disc is divided into 3 parts - The lead-in area containing the Table of Contents, the program area containing the audio data, and the lead-out area containing no data.

After years of research, Sony Phillips in 1980 developed the Red Book Audio specifications for the physical parameters of an audio CD. Not to get too technically specific, parameters are things like optical stylus, deviations and error rates, modulation system and error rates, subcode channels for CD Text and graphics. When the question came up as to how many minutes a CD should hold, Beethoven's Symphony #9 was the length standard at the time. They used Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as the ultimate in terms of length of time. His symphony requires 74 minutes and thus the determination for how much music a standard CD would hold.In terms of the business costs of development and research. each disc - either blanks that are sold or replicated CDs - a portion of your cost is a license fee that is paid back to Sony Phillips for the technology they researched and developed. Initially when CDS were an emerging technology, the license fees were much greater than they are today. Now much less than .10 per disc is paid by replicators and blank disc manufacturers.

One other major CD specification set by the Red Book is the form of digital audio encoding taken on by CDs. The parameters set have become a de-facto standard in the CD duplication industry. Ironically, CD player manufacturers are not required to provide players that conform to 100% of the red book audio standards. Many do, but there are some that don't because of cheaper microchips to keep player costs down for consumers. Over the years, as CDs went from 74 minutes to now 80 minutes, some CD players will stop at 74 minutes 30 seconds which is the official requirement of red book audio.

In general, the technical specifications of Red Book shouldn't be the concern of most consumers. But as a consumer you can take comfort in knowing that there is a high standard of quality being upheld when it comes to your CD duplication, DVD duplication or data CD duplication project. Make sure that when you go to your CD duplication service you ask them if they use Red Book quality CD media.