Here are my thoughts on this subject & I hope that others will voice their opinions too....
If one were not to oversample or upsample, the transition band is very, very steep & to design an analog filter after the D-A operation becomes very expensive & it encroaches badly onto the audio spectrum. Hence the need for over/upsampling. One always wants to reduce cost (& increase profit margins!)
2ndly, I feel that the companies making audio ICs like Burr-Brown, TI, Analog Devices, Crystal to name a few always want more ROI on their efforts to make these audio ICs. Maybe these audio ICs were 1st made for non-audiophile products but over time these companies were always on the look-out for other markets where they could sell the same products & make some additional money at marginal extra cost of manuf. As you know, as volumes of ICs sold go up, their average cost is lowered. So, there is a strong push from the IC vendors to have their products into home audio. It's basically economics for the IC vendors.
3rdly, how many people in the USA (let's restrict it to just this market for now for merely convenience) care about the degradation of up/oversampling sound?? 100? 1000?10,000? The bulk of the people just couldn't care less! Thus, who is going to cater to just a small group of obsessive people? Again, the economies of scale are against us.
4thly, to make a parallel, when we were trying to reach the Moon & we had a fire in one of the Apollo missions & lost very valuable lives, did NASA say "Can we not take some rest and use our resources for better understanding of space travel, effects of this on our highly trained personnel & for perfecting the vehicles"?? I don't think so! They took a break, recollected themselves & pushed ahead. Yes, I know that Pres Kennedy had given them a challenge, which must have had a lot to do w/ that decision but I feel that the Human spirit never flags with failure. We have this thing inside us to try, try again until we succeed. I think that we can extrapolate this spirit to up/oversampling. Only by designing several renditions of the up/oversampling ckts can we learn what is right & wrong sound-wise. Yet another parallel is redbook CDs. If you have any redbook CDs from the 1980s & from today in the same genre (say, Jazz, classical, blues) you can tell that we have learnt a lot on how to make them.
I think that these 3 (of maybe many more) reasons equally weight themselves into why we continue up/oversampling.
Like I said before: IMO. YMMV. FWIW.
If one were not to oversample or upsample, the transition band is very, very steep & to design an analog filter after the D-A operation becomes very expensive & it encroaches badly onto the audio spectrum. Hence the need for over/upsampling. One always wants to reduce cost (& increase profit margins!)
2ndly, I feel that the companies making audio ICs like Burr-Brown, TI, Analog Devices, Crystal to name a few always want more ROI on their efforts to make these audio ICs. Maybe these audio ICs were 1st made for non-audiophile products but over time these companies were always on the look-out for other markets where they could sell the same products & make some additional money at marginal extra cost of manuf. As you know, as volumes of ICs sold go up, their average cost is lowered. So, there is a strong push from the IC vendors to have their products into home audio. It's basically economics for the IC vendors.
3rdly, how many people in the USA (let's restrict it to just this market for now for merely convenience) care about the degradation of up/oversampling sound?? 100? 1000?10,000? The bulk of the people just couldn't care less! Thus, who is going to cater to just a small group of obsessive people? Again, the economies of scale are against us.
4thly, to make a parallel, when we were trying to reach the Moon & we had a fire in one of the Apollo missions & lost very valuable lives, did NASA say "Can we not take some rest and use our resources for better understanding of space travel, effects of this on our highly trained personnel & for perfecting the vehicles"?? I don't think so! They took a break, recollected themselves & pushed ahead. Yes, I know that Pres Kennedy had given them a challenge, which must have had a lot to do w/ that decision but I feel that the Human spirit never flags with failure. We have this thing inside us to try, try again until we succeed. I think that we can extrapolate this spirit to up/oversampling. Only by designing several renditions of the up/oversampling ckts can we learn what is right & wrong sound-wise. Yet another parallel is redbook CDs. If you have any redbook CDs from the 1980s & from today in the same genre (say, Jazz, classical, blues) you can tell that we have learnt a lot on how to make them.
I think that these 3 (of maybe many more) reasons equally weight themselves into why we continue up/oversampling.
Like I said before: IMO. YMMV. FWIW.