But you are forgetting that sounds begin at some point in time. If you have 20 people banging on bottles with their house keys do you think 44.1kHz will capture all the "attacks" going on that the human ear can detect? How about 96kHz? From what I gather even 192kHz may not capture what the human ear can detect in terms of consecutive attacks. It's not all about reproducing a fourier transform of a bunch of continuous sine-waves......
This actually brings up a point I'm a bit confused by. I always thought that digital recording was a continuous process, i.e. that "sampling" is a bit of a misnomer; the digital recorder isn't checking in 44100 times a second, making a little "note" of what's happening, and jotting it down, but is instead taking a continuous waveform and converting it into 44100 values per second. Malc seems to be of the position that the former happens--that the digital recorder checks in 44100 times a second, and thus can't possibly "hit" all of these attacks because they might happen on one of those "off-samples" or something.
I could, however, be totally wrong, and I'd like the actual technical people here to address this briefly before I say anything else.