I work on a lot of vintage and semi-vintage audio gear, and I'm still amazed at how much old school "totem pole" transistor amps are still out there....and running just fine, thank you. The totem-pole circuit was an interim design, made necessary by the lack of decent PNP power transistors, which, later on, made the true complementary-symmetry amplifier practical.

One of the problems with the totem pole circuit is that the "upper" transistor operates as an emitter follower while the lower transistor operates in common emitter....creating a very asymmetrical output gain. Typically, these relied on negative feedback to help even things out...and actually they sound pretty good. Evidence of this is that they were almost universally used in Leslie speakers and early Yamaha electric organs. Even the "golden ears" guys admitted that they were audibly indistinguishable from the vacuum tube predecessors, in most cases.

Of course, I would never design a NEW amplifier with the totem-pole configuration...but there's still a lot of good audio gear out there with this topology.

Eric

 

My old Dynakit Stereo 120 (from the 70's, which works well and I still use) had a totem-pole output with the top being an NPN Darlington-pair follower and the bottom being a Sziklai-pair follower (sometimes call a complementary Darlington, consisting of a small PNP driving the same power NPN as the top pair) so the output drive gain/impedance characteristics were very close to that of a complementary NPN-PNP.