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The vertical axis in the waveform view on your DAW represents positive and negative voltage swings in the analog electrical signal. That electrical signal in turn is an analog of the waves of compression and rarefaction of the air between the acoustic source and the transducer (microphone). So, technically, "up" in the DAW window represents a string or membrane (drum head, guitar string, etc) moving toward you while "down" represents it moving away from you. It has nothing to do with frequency - this is the amplitude component of the waveform. The distance between those peaks would be the period of the waveform, and the reciprocal of that is the frequency.
When you see one half of the waveform having greater amplitude than the other, that is a visual representation of the effect of 2nd-order harmonic distortion. Like tINY said, this is the kind of artifact that sometimes causes the analog to sound better than the original. There are lots of things within the compressor circuit that can cause it. Whether the device has balanced or unbalanced interfacing has nothing to do with it, but push-pull circuits do tend to cancel 2nd-order distortion.
To clarify what Tiny said - It isn't that Class A amplifiers exhibit this behavior. It's only single-ended amplifiers. Since single-ended audio amps have to be Class A to function correctly, the association is erroneously made. Push-pull amplifiers operating in Class A don't exhibit this behavior - they cancel any assymetry of each amplifier half just as class B amplifiers do.
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