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"Kevin McMurtrie" wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Radium) wrote:

I wonder if it would be possible to construct a speaker that "sees"
electric pulses as wave. IOW produce an acoustic sine-wave when hit
with a digital pulse of electricity. When "fed" the "steps" of PCM
pulses it should somehow "smoothen" or round the "points" of those
steps into waves.

There are amps that feed normal speakers directly with digital pulses.
They're mostly for battery powered devices because small size and low
power consumption are their only advantages. Distortion isn't so great
at high frequencies and they radiate EMF.

At some point you have to end up with an analog force unless you want to
make a linear stepper motor. I can't imagine a linear stepper motor
sounding good.

There actually is a digital speaker. It consists of a flat membrane divided
into an array of squares, each of which can be in one of two states. A
computer algorithm is used to drive combinations of the squares to
approximate a continuum of sound levels.

I don't have the link. However, the sound was said to have an interesting
quality -- ie., not bad, but not compellingly good either.