> An experienced engineer can look at a waveform in a DAW and identify specific consonants, vowels, specific words, etc quite fluently.

DAWs' rendered waveforms have so little information that such identification is likely impossible even in theory. Telling apart plosives and vowels maybe, but not much more than that.

I work with phoneticians and they can (sometimes) read even words from suitably scaled spectrograms, but that's a lot more information than in waveforms.