Do you lose quality if you convert audio from 44.1khz to 48khz?

[sidders]

My card only allows me to use 44khz, so I have to change it to 48khz when I encode.

[jdobbs]

Not in a single conversion. What happens when converting is a mathmatical "resampling" -- what that comes down to is a 1.08844:1 upmix. Essentially you will get a single value generated every 11.3 samples... it usually is either a repeat or an average of the sample before and after the point of insertion. It doesn't change the quality, it pretends to have sampled it at the higher rate.

Where you run into problems is when you go from 48K to 44.1K and back a few times or when downconverting and going back up. If you had two non-identical algorithms doing the conversion, you may keep losing "true" samples for the ones that were generated...