Disc Players

In its marketing of the new Viking CD player much is made by Hegel, and the online bloggers who copy and paste press releases, of its status as a 'Red Book' (Redbook, sic) CD player. In practice, defining a disc player by the colour of its 'Book' – the technical standard, or system description, outlining the scope of the data and its physical representation – tells us more about what the player cannot do. Historically, the 'Compact Disc-Digital Audio' (CD-DA) format was introduced in 1982 by Philips NV in collaboration with the Sony Corporation, its specification published in a document called the Red Book on which all other CD formats were subsequently based. The CD format was quickly adopted by computer brands as part of the 'High Sierra Proposal' defining a data storage format that included accessible file names and folders/directories (ISO Standard 9660). The CD-ROM was officially launched in 1985 and is described in the Yellow Book. Next came CD-I, or Compact Disc Interactive, which was defined in the Green Book followed by, in 1990 and 1995 respectively, the Orange Book and Scarlet Book.

Arguably, these last two Books are of particular interest to audiophiles, the first describing the recordable (CD-R, CD-RW, etc) disc format initially as 'professional only' and then as a domestic product with the launch of hi-fi CD-R/RW recorders in 1992. The Scarlet Book outlines the entirely distinct SACD format with its higher rate one-bit encoding, finer physical (pit/land) structure and shorter wavelength laser. The very first players – the Philips CD100 [HFN Oct '11] and Sony CDP-101 [HFN Jan '12] were both 'Red Book' but, like Hegel's Viking, subsequently proved able to read CD-Rs and the CD layer of dual-layer SACDs. So, in practice, the best Red Book players also have a hint of Orange and Scarlet that brings a splash of extra colour to their playback playbooks! PM