Although that's technically true, the DAC and the transducer do not necessarily need to be discrete components. There's some super interesting research on digit

Although that's technically true, the DAC and the transducer do not necessarily need to be discrete components. There's some super interesting research on digital sound reproduction: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~mems/pubs/pdfs/ieee/mems/0071_diamond-2002.pdf https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~mems/pubs/pdfs/ieee/mems/0071_diamo... and I'm aware of at least one company that is (apparently) in fairly late stages of commercialisation (http://www.audiopixels.com.au http://www.audiopixels.com.au).