I think I know why: Went through hell once to get a 48kHz track to convert down to 44.1kHz with minimal loss so I could burn it. The result was a lot of audible quantization artifacts (I believe) but was good enough.

Funny, I happen to be going through something similar right now, although my problem is bit depth instead of sampling rate. I've got some 24-bit wav files that I need to convert down to 16-bit so that they'll open in my editing software. Seems like that would be a pretty simple conversion that could be done by a piece of freeware, but I'm having a hell of a time locating such a utility.

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Tony Fabris