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That would be pretty nuts, sending out a digital signal and have a built-in DAC for each emitter. Probably way too much bandwidth for any of the standard busses though.

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As an example, a thousand channels of 16-bit samples at 48 kHz adds up to 768 Mbits/s, which is well within USB3 bandwidth many times over.

1000 channels is a rather small array, though. 5000 is still not too much.

A lot of the signal is going to be identical, so a hierarchical distribution with in-place modification based on location would be better than calculating the modification of the sound and sending to thousands of channels.

The thing is, don't we have a ton of higher bandwidth buses already available?

I can't imagine the audio interfaces being faster than HDMI 2.0, USB 4/Thunderbolt, DisplayPort 3, etc.

I was thinking more in the line of i2c, i2s, spi, uart, since I think all of those that you listed require very extensive circuitry to parse. (At least that's the motherboard makers' excuse to only include like 2 USB 3.0s and 1 USB 3.1 port and like two bazillion 2.0 ports)

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