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I'm no biologist (I've only had some basic biochemistry), could you elaborate on this? As far as I can recall, each codon encodes a specific amino acid, which means that a single base pair being mistranscripted leads to the wrong amino acid, potentially breaking the protein.
Not sure I get what you mean here either? The difference is in whether each base(-pair) encodes a binary or a ternary bit. Lossless compression redundant data (i.e. what you do when moving from a binary to ternary format) doesn't change the signal-to-noise ratio.
There are 4 × 4 × 4 = 64 possible codons, but only 20(-ish) amino acids. This leaves quite a few spares for some built-in redundancy.
For example, UCU, UCC, UCA, and UCG all code for Serine. The third letter can mutate or be mistranscribed, and still produce an identical protein.