Those two examples emerged independently, like rail standards or any number of other standards one can cite. That's really just the top of the rabbit-hole, since there are 8-20 "standard" audio sample rates, depending how how you count.
This isn't really a drawback, and it does provide flexibility when making tradeoffs for low bitrates (e.g. 8 kHz narrowband voice is fine for most use cases) and for other authoring/editing vs. distribution choices.
44.1khz exists because it was the lowest technically practical speed and was an optimization for processing speed and storage space.
48khz exists because it syncs with video easily — I’ve also heard it allows for more tolerance in the anti-aliasing filter.
I guess meaning 24fps video? Because 44100 is already a multiple of 25, 30, 50, and 60.
44.1 kHz never really went away because CDs continued using it, allowing them to take any existing 44.1 kHz content as well as to fit slightly more audio per disc.
At the end of the day, the resampling between the two doesn't really matter and is more of a minor inconvenience than anything. There are also lots of other sampling rates which were in use for other things too.
Because of greed.
Early audio manufacturers (SONY notably) used 48kHz for profession-grade audio equipment, that would be used in studios or TV stations, and degraded 44.1khz audio for consumer devices. Typically you would pay an order of magnitude more for the 48kHz version of the hardware.
48khz is better for creating and mixing audio. You cannot practically mix audio at 44.1khz without doing very slight damage to audible high frequencies. But enough to make a difference. If you were creating for consumer devices, you would mix at 48Khz, and then downsample to 44.1khz during final mastering, since conversion from 48kHz to 44.1kHz can be done theoretically (and practically) perfectly. (Opinions of the OP notwithstanding).
I think it's safe to say that the 44.1kHz sampling rate was maliciously selected specifically because it is just low enough that perfect playback is still possible, but perfect mixing is practically not possible. And obviously maliciously chosen to be a rate with no convenient greatest common denominator with 48Khz, which would have allowed easy and cheap perfect realtime resampling. Had Sony chose 44.0kHz, it would be trivially easy to do sample rate conversion to 48Khz in realtime even with primitive hardware available in the late 1970s. That extra .1kHz is transparently obvious malice and greed in plain sight.
Presumably SONY would sell you the software or hardware to perform perfect non-realtime conversion of audio from 48khz to 44.1khz for a few tens of thousands of dollars. Not remotely subtle how greedy all of this was.
There has been no serious reason to use 44.1kHz instead of 48kHz for about 50 years, at least from a technology point of view. (And no real reason to EVER use 44.1khz instead of 48kHz other than GREED).
Then Sony used the frequency on CDs.
The evidence is: why on earth would anyone on a standards committee choose 44.1kHz, instead of 44.0kHz? The answer: 44.1kHz was transparently obviously chosen to make it impossible to perform on-the-fly rate conversions.
The mathematics of polyphase rate converters was perfectly well understood at the time these standards were created.
Most stuff on the internet ripped from CD is 44.1. 48 is getting more common. We’re like smack in the middle of the 75 year transition period to 48kHz.
For new projects, I use 48, because my mics are 32bit (float!)/48kHz.
the first CD player didn't had compute power to upsample perfectly but modern devices certainly do.
Though this is just my understanding. Maybe I'm wrong.
