| It's strictly about the downsampling alogorithm and how it acts on the data. 88.2 is obviously an exact 2:1 stepdown to 44.1.
96k is to 44.1 is 2.176870748299319727891156462585:1. Not as clean.
The easiest way to correlate it is think of audio like a digital picture. If you reduce the size of a digital picture exactly 2:1, the math just involves throwing away every other pixel and leaving the remainder. You get the crispest possible image in the reduction because it retains the maximum amount of original image information as possible during the stepdown.
But if you take a 960x960 pixel image, and reduce it to a 441x441 pixel image, the math has to interpolate the difference in the new adjacent pixels to figure out where to put the original colors (in order to approximate the original data).
The result is a slightly less accurate stepdown, but not by much. It all depends on the quality of the algorithm. A digital artist can see it, but Joe Sixpack usually can't.
Which gives you better sound? Hell if I know, I still do 44.1/24. |