[linux-audio-user] Latency question

[Tim Orford]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 02:32:39PM +0400, Guy Clotilde wrote:
> So that's not really use for me to have a 48 khz soundcard... Why such
> a design from the manufacturer? Maybe it makes sense in mass
> production...

i always thought it was to facilitate mixing.

'consumers' expect to be able to play multiple things at
once, with different sample rates. The only way to acheive
this is resample everything to a single sample rate.
48 is a bigger number than 44. 
[In addition, user tests indicated that people were confused by
the .1 in 44.1. :-)]

a card which is concerned with quality will not process
the audio in any way - including mixing - and will switch the 
output to the correct frequency. This does mean however that
the system 'ding' will not sound while you're listening to
an ogg :-) 



cheers
--
Tim Orford