LRosario said:
I think the link you where given was completely inaccurate. If 96k was a recording gimmick, then no one would go through the trouble of manufacturing units that can achieve 96k and beyond.
The simple fact is, although you may not hear the frequency, it becomes a resolution issue. Simply put, the higher the sample rate, the higher the resolution. Also, you can achieve greater dynamic range with higher samples.
You had it... and then you lost it. Greater dynamic range would be dependent on bit depth (16-bit vs. 24-bit), not sample rate.
Resolution is mostly irrelevant in audio, but it does make a difference in believability if you're doing any processing that involves frequency scaling (e.g. AutoTune). That said, a good interpolation algorithm will do almost as good a job with a whole lot less CPU power....
For the most part, the advantage to 96kHz is because most cheap converters don't do oversampling. The frequency stored is the frequency sampled. Doesn't sound all that problematic, but it actually can be.
The problem with this is that to sample at 44.1/48 kHz, you have to have a brick wall filter from 22.05/24kHz up to prevent aliasing. This filter is an analog filter, which can only do so much as far as generating a steep filter without adding nasty artifacts. And the steeper the filter, the more it costs. Guess where a lot of cheap converters cut corners....
The net result is that for many cheap converters, that brick wall filter may start noticeably rolling off sound as low as 16kHz, which is
quite audible. By sampling at four times the desired maximum audible frequency, you generally end up using a different analog filter that starts rolling off at... say 32 kHz---well above the audible range of humans---thus avoiding the loss of high frequencies that would otherwise occur.
By the way, this same filtering occurs on output, so by recording at 44.1 kHz and playing back at 44.1 kHz, you're paying this filter penalty twice.
