[CharlesW]

> 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.

[Joeboy]

> This isn't really a drawback

But, that's only true because people freely resample between them all the time and nobody knows or cares about it.

[pixelpoet]

The nice thing about standards is, there are so many from which to choose! :)