Then what do YOU think is feeding the A/D converter that creates
the audio you hear? If you substitute "44K sample/sec, uncompressed,
fixed-point, 16-bit" for "wav" I see nothing wrong with Mr. Krueger's
explanation.
The digital stream you mention is only the format and data chunks
which by themselves do not fully represent a complete wave file. I was
sending digital streams to hybrid software/hardware DAC's nineteen
years ago before the wave format was invented. A digital stream does
not have to be wave type, can't you get that through your head! We
experimented with early voc, duff (my own standard I developed in
1985) and mod files to dac's so I guess they are waves too as you see
them. Read the format via the web link I posted earlier.