Why is VLC's minimum samplerate 4Khz?

Believe it or not, I compress some of my audio files to below 4Khz, I like to compress things to save as much space as possible because sometimes it's just a couple sinewaves at low frequencies. It won't play files sampled to 3999Hz or below, but will play anything above 4Khz. So for some of these I use the default xplayer that came with my linux mint installation, but that only plays down to 2Khz. I know this is extremely niche, but is there any way to set a lower samplerate?