Why do Playstation 1 discs start at offset 37656?

The Playstation 1 uses CD-ROMs with the XA extension.

If you open a PS1 ISO within a hex editor, you’ll want to scroll down to offset 37656

Within a normal CD (or ISO), it will have a header offset size of 2048.

It seems a little arbitrary but you can read the table of contents by multiplying the header offset by 16.

For a normal CD, this would be 2048 * 16 = 32768

In the case of PS1 discs, the header offset size is 2352 for reasons I don’t understand so they start at 2352 * 16 = 37632

Lastly, and somewhat arbitrarily, you’ll want to jump forward by an additional 24 bytes in order to come to the starting point of 37565 points