I agree with the former statement saying that the bottom line is that it has to be musical or "sound good". Because that is anecdotal and unfortunately science deals with method and repeatability and observable effects and not what sounds good to each person I am focusing on that. Secondly, describing an 18,000 cycle/second waveform with a 88,200 cycle/second sampling rate is good by any standard. However, saying that you do not need more resolution is analogous to saying "why do we need to describe this picture with any more than 5 pixels (I rounded up). Why do we need to describe it with 24?" Resolution, trying to mimic analog which is what digital is doing means that you can always have more resolution. I know that the word mimic probably offends a lot of digital people but you will always lose something in the translation. Can you always put into words what is lost? No, because no one has a spectrum analyzer for ears. Can you tell the difference between two recordings recorded at 96khz and 192khz respectively? Perhaps? Will it make a difference when you dither it to make a CD? Depending on the program and codec you use, absolutely. Of course for every variable besides the ones I describe you have to insert the words "with all things being equal." In the end it has to sound good or musical depending on the digital recording application which is why some really expensive 96khz convertors sound better than some 192khz convertors is because they are not equal in manufacture and they were fabricated with completely different conversion parameters and algorthms but I'm trying to keep this discussion for the layman and not the 12 year Motorola Digital Signal Processing Engineering crowd. Thanks for the great discussion. Its good to see that folks are still smartly looking at the gear out there and not just "buying Sony" or Digidesign as it were.
