> And actually, why do we have both 48kHz and 44.1kHz anyway? Those two examples emerged independently, like rail standards or any number of other standards on

> And actually, why do we have both 48kHz and 44.1kHz anyway? Those two examples emerged independently, like rail standards or any number of other standards one can cite. That's really just the top of the rabbit-hole, since there are 8-20 "standard" audio sample rates, depending how how you count. This isn't really a drawback, and it does provide flexibility when making tradeoffs for low bitrates (e.g. 8 kHz narrowband voice is fine for most use cases) and for other authoring/editing vs. distribution choices.