why 44.1 kHz anyway? especially why the .1?
-F
long post
@Felthry to start, it needs to be more than 40kHz because of the shannon-nyquist theorem (in order to reproduce a certain frequency, you need a sampling rate of at least twice that, and human hearing goes up to around 20kHz)
as for the specific number, it seems to have something to do with the early digital-audio solution of recording to existing analog cassette formats like VCRs. on an NTSC cassette, you have 60 fields per second, and if you record 3 samples per video scanline at 245 lines per field, you get a sample rate of 3*245*60 = 44100 Hz. you can also use 50fps PAL format stuff in the same way with a different number of active lines per field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor are good related reading
re: long post
@typhlosion oh you meant things like just using a VHS tape to store digital audio, i missed that
dunno why the CD would have kept that though--either DCC or DAT or both, don't remember, used 48 kHz, and I think SACD might have also been 48 kHz?
...why do we talk about it as kHz instead of ksps anyway
-F
re: long post
@Felthry when the CD spec was being developed, the most affordable way to get recorded digital audio from the recording studio to the manufacturer was via PCM adaptors putting the data onto and getting it off of tapes, which is where the 44.1kHz number came from in the first place. so the spec was written with that in mind
the DAT format that introduced the 48kHz standard was introduced later on, and by then CDs and the CD-Audio standard had already asserted themselves among consumer electronics
re: long post
@typhlosion that's fair!
it's still a bit of an odd number but it makes a bit more sense now
-F
re: long post
@typhlosion and i don't think there's any real significant advantage of 48 kHz over 44.1, you only really need a little bit more than 40
-F