Gibbs phenomenon indeed and fundamentally you're stuck with it. It's not just "fact", it's a mathematical truth. Pre-ringing is a necessary result of having a sharp low-pass filter with a linear phase response. Actually, very old converters had no pre-ringing because they did not have linear phase. They had tons of post-ringing instead.
Eliminating ringing, pre or post, requires shallow filters and/or non-linear-phase filters. If you still want a flat response to about 20kHz and no aliasing/imaging, this implies a higher sampling rate. Peter Craven pointed out that in a high sampling rate system, all filters could be made sharp at fs/2 and that a single slow-roll filter starting at 20kHz then reduces the ringing. You don't want all filters to be slow rolloff because a cascade of slow rolloff filters becomes a sharp filter so there would be no point in converter manufacturers including them as standard. If you want to control the impulse response of the system, you should use exactly one slow filter (and a release medium of at least 96kHz), preferably during mastering. He calls this type of filter "apodizing".
Of course the question is, with 96kHz, is pre-ringing at 48kHz an issue at all, what with most loudspeakers imposing an apodising filter of their own (not to mention ears)?