Can somebody explain a bit more about what this actually does ? Does it effect which part of the sound gets distorted ?
I’ve noticed turning it to quarter past can kill unwanted noise floor in certain sounds.
Oddly over headphone I find turning this, or the Comp’s ‘mix’ encoder can make the noise floor introduced pan left or right.
What is going on there?
This is over headphones btw, you may not hear it on monitors.
it’s an odd effect!
haven’t really inspected waveforms… probably would be best to record audio without DC offset compensation & look at the wave to best see what’s going on…
what this does is add positive or negative DC offset to the master audio (shifting the wave up or down), after the compressor… so it also affects the audio-in.
beyond a certain threshold, sound with low amplitude seems to be abruptly silenced, e.g. it does some unique gating effect…
I like the gnarl it gives to bassy sounds…
I thought EXT IN came after the Distortion effect and before the compressor?
yea! the SYM doesn’t seem to be part of the distortion circuit though. it seems to be the final thing after the compressor, at least this is how it appears to me.
try it with an external input:
tweaking compressor settings does affect the SYM behavior, so from observation I do believe SYM is the last component in the master chain…
Thanks for the info!
Still unsure why Is am getting panning, only at tiny increments in certain places, anybody noticed this ?
Doesn’t this just add a DC offset effectively pushing the waveform up or down so that the top or bottom gets clipped more heavily?
You can get silence at extreme values because this can shift the entire waveform above or below the clipping point.
Maybe you can hear subtle panning differences because the effect isn’t perfectly balanced across both stereo channels?
Quite intriguing that the SYM is not contained within the distortion block in the signal flow. Have to test with external signals!
Speaking of which, has anyone managed to coax subtle effects from the SYM control? All I’ve gotten out of it so far are these fuzzy “underbiased” voltage starved sounds… And have been mostly thinking “this would be great setting if it were per track, but it’s just too much for the 2-bus”.
The symmetry control indeed seems to clip rather hashly, esp. compared to the per-channel overdrive. I think this was intended as a fun way to “destroy” the mix in a break and not as anything very subtle. 
Electron probably added a hard limiter at the very end of the signal chain to make sure sudden peaks couldn’t easily damage any quipment the RYTM might get hooked up to. From there it was a simple step to add a controllable DC offset to the signal to get an additional asymmetrical overdrive.
Having this before the compressor would have required additional components.
sym is a little gem parameter it seems -
p-locking this and distortion plus a bit of compression seems to take me into glitch micro house land
clicks and smooth pops 
adds a bit of vol based groove also, maybe?
best advice i can give to a new AR owner, if they stumble over this thread is - immediately use the compressor and sym distortion and overdrive and set to taste - just massive analog drums and not in the least bit ear fatiguing and really the polar opposite to my old read devil md
I totally agree. I’m loving the DIST and COMP combo, placing LFOs on the FX sequence.
What I’m struggling with is the lack of EQ on a per track basis. I enjoy the DIST and COMP so much that I use it a lot, leaving f*** all room for EQing in DAW as everything gets printed as a 2 channel track.
Which usually I’m fine with as I can edit each track inside whatever box I’m using, but in the A4s case the lack of EQ is really a PITA.
you could route your EQ’d mix back into the Rytm inputs, though i think you can only use comp on it.
i was having a play with the effects the other night (just the effects, nothing else) and oh man they are nice! 
especially in combination with the dedicated pattern and p-locks … lots of fun!
can get really weird stuff by playing with the delay and the distortion together; most of which will probably endanger the ears and as usual: tiny changes can sometimes lead to drastic changes in the sound all worth it though