How to convert the sound file emited by parec to wav format?

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

I want to convert the output of parec to wav format, probably using sox.
parec emits its output in a number of formats, of which the most
promising seem to be s16le and s16be.  Some questions:

(1) What are these formats?  They are not listed in the sox man page,
nor do they seem to be defined anywhere on the web.

(2) The default format is s16ne, which can be either of s16le or s16be
depending on the endedness of the processor.  For an x86_64 system, what
is this default format?

Thanks - jon