Possibly stupid IR question about Helix exported IRs

[SaschaFranck]

Hi,

 

It says somewhere that the Helix supports IRs in the format 48kHz/16bit/mono. Fine. Anything else will be automatically converted on import (and truncated, in case it's too long). Fine again.

Ok, now, when you export any IRs, the exported file is a 32bit-float one. So, my guess would be that this is the format the Helix is using when doing its internal calculations - from all I know, most DAWs do it the same way.

So, my question would be what's actually happening within the IR business? When I load a 24bit file (which HX Edit accepts just fine), will it be converted to 16bit first but then treated like 32bit-float? That sounds like a sort of convoluted thing to me already. Then, possibly even more important: What happens with these exported 32-bit float IRs when I re-import them (pretty much the most obvious thing to do when dealing with backups and what not)? Will they also be converted to 16bit and then back to 32bit-float?

I could possibly try whether there's some kind of signal degration happening after multiple exports/imports, but perhaps someone with a bit more technical insight could shed some light on this.