Sziklai pair

Some claim that using two Sziklai pairs gives a better sound than Darlington-based designs.

Sziklai pair (Compound transistor, complementary Darlington)

In electronics, the Sziklai pair (also known as a "compound transistor") is a configuration of two bipolar transistors, similar to a Darlington pair.

By using two Sziklai pairs which both have mixed NPN/PNP type, the intent is to improve push-pull matching.

A similar configuration but with transistors of opposite type (one NPN and one PNP) is the Sziklai pair, sometimes called the "complementary Darlington."

In contrast to the Darlington arrangement, the Sziklai pair has one NPN and one PNP transistor, and so it is sometimes called the "complementary Darlington".

Sziklai pairs are sometimes used in the push-pull output stage of power amplifiers (e.g., for audio) when the designer wants to use devices of the same type (e.g., NPN), instead of complementary types, which rarely match accurately.

Recently, PNP and NPN transistors have become roughly equally available and have more closely matched performance characteristics, and so modern audio power amplifiers often use equivalent topologies for both pairs (e.g., both Sziklai pairs as described above).

George Clifford Sziklai (July 9, 1909 in Budapest, Hungary - September 9, 1998 in Los Altos, California) was a renowned electronics engineer, who among many other contributions to radio and TV electronics invented the transistor configuration named after him, the Sziklai pair.