However, you can treat a stream of 16 bit chunks coming at you at 44.1KHz as a stream of single bits coming at you at 11.3MHz. This is what a 1-bit DAC does, essentially. I'm not exactly sure how it works from there

The 44.1KHz stream of 16 bit samples (pulse code modulated, PCM), gets converted into a digital stream which is high (logic 1) and low (logic 0) for lengths of time in proportion to each sample (effectively, pulse width modulated, PWM).

So when one of your 44.1KHz samples is, say, 15000, then during that particular 1/44100 of a second the bitstream will be high for 15000/65536 of the time and low for, er, 50536/65536 of the time.

Then you get this bitstream to dump, or not, the charge from a single capacitor onto the output. As there's only one capacitor, you don't need to get the range of very accurately spaced capacitor values of the "traditional" solution.

The resulting signal is, of course, very very noisy at high frequencies, but you just filter off everything above audio frequency.

Peter