Converting from 44.1k to 48k is lossless, and has always been. Converting from 48k to 44.1k is practically lossless: You lose frequencies above 28KHz, but that's about the range at which human hearing drops off anyway.
> Recall that we couldn’t just throw it on a computer and resample it back then.
Of course you could. How else do you think CDs were mastered and produced? The CD was developed with the idea of using it on computers, and for computer storage. And if, in practice, someone wanted to copy it, they'd just record the CD to tape using analog out (not quite lossless, but nobody cared back then), or copy CD/CD with no resampling required.
The 44.1k is a mostly historical accident, and it goes back to the Red Book CD audio spec being reused from an earlier project for digital audio that Sony was working on, the U-matic, where 44.1k was basically how much audio would fit evenly into some number of lines in the tape's storage.
You may be correct about the origins of 44.1, sounds plausible.
I don’t think we are aiming at the same concept. I was there, as perhaps you were too.
Average consumers did not posses, could not afford, technology to duplicate CDs easily or to convert a CD to DAT.
I can’t recall all this after so much time has passed, but the gist is that somehow the record industry influenced the deployment of technology to reduce lossless duplication ability for consumers.
It wasn’t until home computers became so fast and ubiquitous that this changed.
> Recall that we couldn’t just throw it on a computer and resample it back then.
Of course you could. How else do you think CDs were mastered and produced? The CD was developed with the idea of using it on computers, and for computer storage. And if, in practice, someone wanted to copy it, they'd just record the CD to tape using analog out (not quite lossless, but nobody cared back then), or copy CD/CD with no resampling required.
The 44.1k is a mostly historical accident, and it goes back to the Red Book CD audio spec being reused from an earlier project for digital audio that Sony was working on, the U-matic, where 44.1k was basically how much audio would fit evenly into some number of lines in the tape's storage.