But with a lot of software you get to chose the type of dither when you resample. So it's not as simple as just saying dither or resample, you can't have one without the other. Whether it's 96kHz to 44.1kHz or 48kHz to 44.1kHz OR just adding EQ.
Sure you can, I can dither something and not resample it, likewise I can resample something and truncate it without dither. Second, I can think of a couple of software packages, both free and expensive, that have the two segregated so you control when they occur independantly.
And then there are those frequencies beyond the sampling resolution that will get sampled at half their frequency, if you don't use a higher sampling rate. i.e. 30kHz (beyond human hearing) recorded at 15kHz (within the range of human hearing). And some mics are very sensitive well into and past that frequency. And many things will produce those frequencies. Maybe not your speakers, but they'll try. At the higher sampling rates, you have a better chance of filtering those off. i.e. less overall noise.
I'm assuming you are referring to harmonics, because I can't think of anything else at 30khz that I'd want to reproduce verbatim in a
music recording
without altering the speed, and whatever is coming across to be sampled at 15khz is still there regardless of whether I chose 48k or 96k. Actually, I can't think of anything I'd want to reproduce verbatim at 30khz period.
1) Just because there is information there, and you're speakers try to resolve it and fail, doesn't make it positive. Gallant attempting and failing is still failure.
2) As DSatz, my audiologist, and others have pointed out; humans exposed to concert environments can't really hear much past around 17khz anyway. So recording anything up there is sort of moot for our purposes. Which brings me to #3:
3) Whether you filter something when you have 48khz of information or 22khz of information at the time of recording is moot if at the end of the day your target audience can't hear it,
and you're chucking it anyway.
So I'm with cooker et al; I think you're more likely to do damage through the adding of artifacts and distortion to your recording via resampling if you have a bad algorithm rather than recording at a lower sampling rate.
Has anyone ever tried to do some kind of a controlled test to see whether a 48kHz recording sounded audibly different than a dithered 44.1?
Here is one controlled test:
http://drewdaniels.com/audible.pdf
neat read.