Quote Originally Posted by Marcel View Post
In my mind I see it this way. On a 440Hz note and with 44100 per second sample rate there will be close to 100 individual samples available to rebuild a single cycle of the original "sound" at the loud speaker, but on the 88th note of a piano at 4186.1Hz there will only be about 10 individual samples to rebuild all the complexities of that specific piano note. Ten samples is still quite a lot and will be fairly representative but it will not be 100% accurate. Thankfully though we don't have dust and static to contend with.
As Doc Nomis said, the Nyquist Theorem states that if the sampling rate is more than double the maximum frequency you are trying to sample, then you can reproduce that sound perfectly. It doesn't matter if the frequency is 20 Hz or 20,000Hz, if you are sampling at 44.1kHz, then both frequencies get reproduced accurately. Each sample represents a point on a curve (not the height of a step) and the D/A converter recreates the curve as a continuous voltage wave.

There's a great video on this web page that explains almost all of the misconceptions about digital audio. https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml