DAC or CD Player. Help!

Hi all. First post ever. Just dived into this fascinating rabbit hole a few weeks ago and trying to learn as fast as I can. Audiogon seems to be one of the best places to do this.
Sorry to take a perfectly intelligent question from the OP and make it unbelievably obtuse, but here's my confusion: a standard CD player (as opposed, I gather, to a pure "transport") must have a DAC, or something similar, built in, right? Otherwise how do the ones and zeros turn into an analog signal that feeds directly into the pre-amp/integrated/receiver? So if there's an analog signal coming out of the CD player...how does it make sense to run that signal into a standalone DAC? So there must be a separate output from the CD player that transmits an unconverted digital signal, bypassing the DAC (or whatever it is) inside the CD player, and this unconverted signal is what you would cable to the standalone DAC, thus making your CD player into a pure transport? I never noticed such an output on my 20-yr-old old Sony CD player, but I guess I never thought to look. Thanks for the education!

jamcl63, Welcome.  I'm in this rabbit hole since 2005 for the same reason - to learn.  You pretty much answered your own questions.  Yes CDP has its own D/A converter and analog electronics but it also has digital output providing serial stream of data called S/Pdif (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format).  As you noticed, CDP becomes a transport when this output is used instead of analog out.  Not every CDP has digital output.
Stream of zeros and ones on this output is being read by the DAC.  It is important to keep this stream of data steady since any time variation - a time jitter will convert into noise on analog side.

Thank you for clearing this up...I'd seen it written "SPDIF" and wondered. Lots to learn....