Sampler's digital out vs. d/a/d conversion

[nunyabusiness]

I do most of my music with a digital sampler (ASR-10 to be specific), but I’ve been experimenting with recording all the tracks separately and mixing them in my computer. I’ve been recording from the sampler's analogue outputs (the ASR-10 has both analogue and digital outputs), but I recently read an article at digido.com which said that, while digital processing certainly wreaks havoc on your sounds, so will A/D conversions. The article said that going to digital should ideally be the last step, but regardless, once your audio hits the digital domain, it should never be converted back to analogue until it gets to the consumers CD player. This has peaked my interest in the ASR-10’s digital output, but it can only output 16 bit 44.1 khz (at best). It seems to me that there must be a hell of a lot of calculations going on in order to keep the sounds at that sample rate. Evan if a sound was originally sampled at 44.1, play it an octave higher and its twice the sample rate, lower and it’s half that. So it obviously can’t be maintaining the integrity of the original sample. With this in mind, would it be better to record the analogue outputs (which I could theoretically record at 24 bit 96khz) or would it still be better to record from the digital outputs? Is it likely that the ASR-10 is recalculating to 44.1 before it sends it to the analogue output anyway?

Any comments, interpretations, or theoretical lessons would be appreciated
Thanks in advance.
NB

P.S. I had trouble picking which discussion to post this in. Let me know if you think I would get better responses in a one of the others.