Sampling rate affects only one thing: the highest frequency that can be accurately reproduced. That's it.
With modern anti-aliasing filters, 48 KHz sampling can accurately reproduce just a little over 20 KHz, which is the highest frequency that the best human eats can hear. Anything above that is inaudible, which makes it a waste of resources in an audio system.
Well, somewhat. They can produce a mangled 22k signal... and I would argue a mangled 12.25k signal... and so on. Go down into the real concepts. They have been feeding us the lie that 44.1k can do up to 22k.... well, it just isn't true in the real world.