When the very first CD players came out, Philips (who as co-inventors of CD had an inside run, after all) were widely deemed to have a better sound than their competitors.
Philips used quadruple oversampling which allowed much more gentle filtering than the sharp brick-wall filters needed for a hard cut-off around 44-kHz.
On the other hand, with the laser resistor-trimming technology used back then, it was hard to get monotonic increases in output to match the input bit settings. Philips simply dropped the last two bits.