play wav circuit
I once made a 8-channel sampler that dumped 16-bit wav audio to DACs. The DAC I used was a cheap maxim 16-bit serial dac, which worked OK.
The way it worked was that samples were stored in SRAM, a microcontroller recieved MIDI messages from an instrument and loaded a sample's address and length into an FPGA. The FPGA controlled the index (location in memory) of all 8-channels, and queued up the proper memory data when it was that channel's time to play. A second FPGA grabbed data for each channel and sent it to the DAC via I2C protocol.
The FPGA's were written in VHDL and compiled to Quicklogic chips. None of the routines were very complicated, I could probably send you some VHDL of how addressing, etc was done but it's all written for you in the datasheet for the memory chip you want to use.
If you just wanted to build a player circuit, all you need is a binary counter, a RAM chip, and a DAC. Use the counter to churn through all the different addresses in memory that your sample (16-bit mono wav) is stored. Start by resetting the counter to 0, and each time you clock out a new address to the memory chip, you also trigger the DAC to latch in a new sample - speed up the clock to speed up playback, etc. All pretty straightforward.
The reason I said mono wav is that the mono wav format is stored as the raw samples - no decoding is needed, just store the core block of wav data in memory and you're ready to play to DAC. Stereo wav alternates R sample, L sample but is pretty much the same.
If you can give some more specifics I bet we can get something working. Serial DACs are cheapest but you need an FPGA or PAL to clock in the data in the proper serial format. You could probably fit this into two PALCE20V8's, each of which gives 8-bits worth of logic.
Hope it helps!