S24LE and S32LE format equivalency

Hi all,

Quick question, I was troubleshooting a 24bit USB device and got down the rabbit hole of sample formats. The device advertises itself as S24LE (4byte payload) but it appears as S32LE under alsa, something that bothered me a lot initially. However, If the conversion between the two formats is to just << 8 i.e. put a zero byte as LSB, then the two formats are essentially equivalent.

Is this actually the case? If yes, who performs the conversion? Is it on the alsa side, or the device already adds a zero byte LSB?

Thank you in advance,

Marios