DaveH, the way things developed historically in the audio industry, 44.1 kHz was chosen as the standard sampling rate for Compact Disc in part because the only suitable recording medium at the time was videotape, and 44.056 or 44.1 kHz were just high enough to allow recording audio up to 20 kHz while being compatible with various standard frame rates for video.
44.1 kHz wasn't ideal in all respects, however. This was back in the days of all-analog filtering (late 1970s to early 1980s), and filters steep enough to allow (nearly) flat response to (nearly) 20 kHz while being significantly down by 22.05 kHz were difficult and expensive to manufacture, and they weren't always sonically transparent.
One way to facilitate the use of sonically better filters is to raise the sampling rate while keeping the 20 kHz limit. But that's not the only possible way to improve digital recording quality by far, and it's definitely not "the higher the sampling rate the better" except in some people's imaginations--there are still a lot of people who fundamentally misunderstand how digital audio works, and in my experience those are almost invariably the people who expect higher sampling rates to sound better automatically.
The practical limit on any real benefit in terms of reproducible, audible sound fidelity might perhaps be somewhere around 60 kHz, but unfortunately that's not a standard frequency (strangely, while 32 kHz is a standard sampling rate, 64 kHz is not). 88.2 and 96 kHz are standard rates and while even higher rates exist, they're pretty much an exercise in doing something "because you can." In certain respects the higher you go the worse it can get, depending on the implementation.
Topic: upgrading to a digital recorder (Read 5247 times)