Most likely your Tascam will take an analog signal and convert it to digital at 24/48 because in some options screen you have told it to. Then when it burns, it would dither it to 16/44. If however you are inputting digitally, than it just sets itself to whatever you are feeding it. Usually an outboard burner will do its conversion directly to 16/44 off the analog inputs unless it is something like the Alesis Masterlink which has a hard drive and actual editing features. Have you ever tried dithering your files with your audio application? This should sound much better than just letting Nero or Roxio or whatever CDR program you are using convert it on its own. This would save the whole realtime transfer progress
Higher rates are certainly possible on DVD. In fact, it is done fairly frequently. I bought my father a super audio CD player last year. It plays 24/96 discs in true 5.1 surround. The problem is that you have to buy a disc specifically encoded and mixed for SACD to get the true effect, and thos same discs are not compatible in other CD players. Only those which have been made to support SACD. I beleive I saw somewhere that they do have SACD's that are compatible in regular players as well as a standard 16/44, but when played in an SACD player they do the full 5.1 24/96 thing
Higher rates are certainly possible on DVD. In fact, it is done fairly frequently. I bought my father a super audio CD player last year. It plays 24/96 discs in true 5.1 surround. The problem is that you have to buy a disc specifically encoded and mixed for SACD to get the true effect, and thos same discs are not compatible in other CD players. Only those which have been made to support SACD. I beleive I saw somewhere that they do have SACD's that are compatible in regular players as well as a standard 16/44, but when played in an SACD player they do the full 5.1 24/96 thing