sound cards and sampling rates

["Susan E. Hall" <susanhal@xxxxxxxxx>]

I was hoping someone could help me to understand a little about the
antialiasing lowpass filters in sound output devices. I'm digitally
constructing stimuli using Matlab, which can play sounds using any
specified sampling rate. So far I've only used 44100Hz and 22050Hz
because these are standard, and I want to be sure they are being
properly antialised on DA output to my headphones. I would really
like to able to use a sampling rate of say, 32000, but am unsure how
my sound card would handle this. I am using out of the box Macintosh
computers (a Powermac G3 and an older, 8600 model). I don't know the
specifics of their sound cards.

First, have I even characterized the issue properly? Is this in fact
something I need to worry about?

If so, does anyone know how standard Apple sound cards deal with
non-standard sampling rates, or more generally, how to find out? Or
are there better sound cards that I should look into? Thanks!

Susan Hall
Dalhousie University