  In this paper, we provide a concrete interpretation of equivariant
Reidemeister torsion and demonstrate that Bismut-Zhang's equivariant
Cheeger-M\"{u}ller theorem simplifies considerably when applied to locally
symmetric spaces. In a companion paper, this allows us to extend recent results
on torsion cohomology growth and torsion cohomology comparison for arithmetic
locally symmetric spaces an equivariant setting.
