@slyka @miunau Having had to grub through the Red Book standard, what I see is an analogue format which just happens to use PCM rather than the depth of a groove. I offer as evidence subchannel P, which is equivalent to the shiny bit between tracks on a record, and seeking being a case of guesstimating the position and dropping the needle/laser and just playing whatever is there.

CD-ROM had to do quite a lot more work than you might expect to turn this unholy digital/analogue hybrid into a proper block device suitable for data storage.