[dspig]

Some old friends there!

"the Sony DTC1000ES was mixing heaven. It offered 2 tracks of of 16bit @ 48kHz recording and was the ideal machine to master to for those who were preparing tracks for CD pressing."

Note the pictured machine has the HHB modification to run at 44.1 kHz to make it actually useful for CD mastering.

[lb1lf]

-I had (and have, though it isn't used much these days) a Sony PCM-M1 ultraportable DAT deck in the late nineties. Wonderful for recording live gigs. It was, if memory serves, the exact same unit as the consumer counterpart - TCD-D100 - except the latter lacked the 44.1/48kHz sample rate selector - it was 48kHz only. (Oh, and on the M1 you could tell it to ignore the SCMS system, allowing only one digital generation of copying.)

The going theory at the time was that Sony, being big in content production, didn't want consumer DAT units being able to make bit perfect copies of CDs.

Good times. Reminds me I ought to bring out the box of DAT tapes and transfer them to my computer soon. In latter years, I've simply listened to them or at the very least fast-forwarded through the tapes a couple of times a year to minimize the risk of the tape sticking to itself.

[jiofih]

I was under the impression mastering at 48khz and then downsampling to 44.1khz afterwards resulted in better quality due to reduced aliasing.

[radiowave]

The trade-off is that sample rate conversion introduced its own artefacts, though we have much better algorithms (and of course more CPU power) for it today.

I'm not sure that aliasing was in itself a big problem, you're perhaps refering more to the audio artefacts introduced by the anti-aliasing filter. But in any case this wasn't even the biggest problem with converters back then. IME, quantization distortion was a much bigger issue. You had to watch the signal levels really carefully - too loud and you'd get absolutely brutal distortion (sometimes including wrap-around, where the value reported by the A/D converter goes instantly from maximum value to minimum value), too quiet and everything turns into a grainy-sounding mush.

The world changed in the early 90s when delta-sigma (aka "oversampling") converters came along, pretty much solved all these issues, and so allowed the price of decent converters to steadily fall, as normal semiconductor manufacturing economics kick in.

[marcan_42]

These days the benefit of 48kHz is that you get twice the frequency headroom vs 44.1k (from 20kHz to Nyquist), which means that any processing steps using oversampling and antialiasing filters (which you should be using) will either sound better, use less CPU, or both, since the filter has to be only half as steep on 48k.

But that's for intermediate processing, once you have the master you can convert to 44.1 one final time and that's that. One final sample rate conversion with modern algorithms will not introduce any audible differences.