That's the "further processing" notion the grandparent comment talked about. A correctly processed signal at 44.1kHz is more than sufficient to reproduce all a

That's the "further processing" notion the grandparent comment talked about. A correctly processed signal at 44.1kHz is more than sufficient to reproduce all audio. But if you're going to do something with the sample series (like low-pass it for aliasing protection in your example, or to resample it for conversion, or for any effects or mixing step really) it's good to have extra data in there to prevent headaches. Likewise sampling at 24+ bits prevents accumulated error in repeated processing, etc... There's a space in the audio world for more bits of data. But the final output format isn't where it belongs.