A toy-motor maker, a reflector and an engineer.

Elipson did not start out making loudspeakers. French Wikipedia and the company’s own history agree that it began in 1938 as Multimoteur, a small firm making electric motors for toys — French Wikipedia mentions model trains — and, the company adds, miniature electrical parts for transformers, generators and alternators. The retailer Son-Vidéo credits Henry Bazin as its founder; French Wikipedia describes him as the firm’s director in 1940, when he and the engineer Maurice Latour began work on a loudspeaker made of a sphere and an ellipse-shaped reflector.

The man most associated with the brand arrived later. Joseph Léon, born in Bordeaux in 1908 and trained at the Arts et Métiers engineering school, had worked on cinema sound for the Compagnie Radio Cinéma, part of the CSF group, from 1930, French Wikipedia says. He joined Multimoteur as commercial director in 1946 and became general director in 1948. French Wikipedia calls him the “true creator” of the company and of its turn to acoustics; the company calls its history “inseparable” from his. Retail copy sometimes calls him the founder, which the company’s own dates do not support.

In 1951 Multimoteur became Elipson, a contraction, the company says, of ellipse and son, the French word for sound — to be pronounced “Elipson,” it adds, not “Elipsonne.” French Wikipedia lists a dozen French patents in the firm’s name between 1950 and 1970, on reflectors, ported and resonator enclosures and a directional “Étoile” system; the company today speaks of more than 60 patents. In 1962 Léon received France’s Ordre national du Mérite “for research and invention,” French Wikipedia says. It gives his death as 15 March 1987, though one passage of the same article says 1984.

Spheres, conches and the ORTF.

Elipson’s early speakers looked like nothing else. Under Léon the firm experimented with reflectors, resonators, conches and spheres cast in staff, a plaster-based material. The company’s history quotes a tribute by Édouard Pastor describing its workshop at Vitry in the 1950s and 1960s as looking like a sculptor’s studio: moulders worked under a craftsman from Tuscany, a mould lasted only 150 units, about fifty speakers left each day, and abandoned prototypes shaped like amphorae, eggs and rabbit ears lay in a heap, “beautiful, useless, poetically white.”

The work was mostly professional. French Wikipedia says Elipson equipped the French broadcaster, the RTF and later the ORTF, over a period running to 1973, and the French pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The company says the BS50, a ball with an elliptical reflector, was designed for the first son-et-lumière show at the Château de Chambord, and its timeline credits Elipson with sound for the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics. From 1960, French Wikipedia says, an ORTF request for a monitor speaker led to the multi-way “Religieuse,” of which perhaps twenty were made, and then to the 4050, which became the reference speaker of the magazine La Revue du Son.

The public followed after 1967, with the BS40/2, a two-way sphere 40 centimetres across that French Wikipedia calls the must-have of home hi-fi in its day. The drivers inside came from several suppliers, including Supravox, Audax, Tannoy, JBL and Cabasse. Léon’s last design was the 1303; French Wikipedia repeats a legend that the public version was drawn by Raymond Loewy, which we have not been able to confirm. In 1973, the same article says, Elipson began building wooden-cabinet speakers and moved from Le Plessis-Robinson to Bagneux, south of Paris.

Design and documentation.

France has a long record in audio. Elipson, founded in 1938, is described by French Wikipedia as the country’s oldest high-end loudspeaker brand, and Cabasse, founded by Georges Cabasse in 1950, moved to Brest around 1960, the company says. Later came Focal, founded by Jacques Mahul in 1979 in the Saint-Étienne area which Belgium’s Barco agreed to buy, with Britain’s Naim, in 2026; the valve-amplifier maker Jadis, founded in 1983 and based near Carcassonne; Davis Acoustics, founded in 1986 and now in Troyes; and Devialet, founded in Paris in 2007.

Reviewing an Advance Paris CD player in 2025, Stereophile wrote: “Think French hi-fi and you think Focal, Triangle, Cabasse, Jadis, Devialet.” At home the trade gathers at the Paris Audio Video Show, held in October 2025 at the Palais des Congrès, and in magazines such as ON Mag.

The makers in this guide are spread across the country, according to their websites and the French company register: Cabasse at Plouzané, outside Brest; Triangle at Villeneuve-Saint-Germain, beside Soissons, in the Aisne; Elipson’s owner, AV Industry, at Champigny-sur-Marne, in the Val-de-Marne; Micromega, owned since 2021 by La Boite Concept, which assembles at Soorts-Hossegor, in the Landes; Atoll at Brécey, in Normandy; and Advance Paris in central Paris, with a design office at Brie-Comte-Robert.

YBA, named after its founder, Yves-Bernard André, is harder to place: China’s Shanling took a significant stake in it in 2009, What Hi-Fi? reported, and ON Mag wrote in 2025 that its products are designed in France but made under Shanling’s oversight.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand of AV Industry since 2008.

The original company did not survive. French Wikipedia, citing the Infogreffe register, says Elipson was placed in judicial liquidation on 27 February 2008 and that its assets were sold to AV Industry on 14 April 2008; the old company was struck off the trade register in 2016. AV Industry, a company created in 2004 and registered at Champigny-sur-Marne, east of Paris, also handles brands including NorStone and Highland Audio, according to company-register summaries. Elipson’s own history describes the buyer as “a young entrepreneur in love with the brand,” Philippe Carré, with his partner Éric James, and says he repositioned Elipson in the world of decoration and design, hiring the creative director Jean-Yves Le Porcher and the designer Jullien Thaler, who had run a website on the brand’s heritage.

The new team’s first products were the 4260, a modern successor to the 4050, and the Planet L and Planet M, spheres with a coaxial driver in place of the old wide-band units, launched around 2009 or 2010 — French Wikipedia gives 2009, Son-Vidéo 2010. The range has since grown to column and bookshelf speakers such as the Legacy and Heritage lines, Chroma turntables, amplifiers and connected speakers; the company describes the Chroma as the first turntable with built-in Bluetooth, a claim we have not checked.

On where things are made, the company is specific. It says its design office is at Champigny-sur-Marne and that its factory at Saint-Fargeau, in Burgundy, makes the Chroma turntables, the Legacy range and the P1 and A2700 amplifiers. It does not say where the rest of the range is made, and we did not find a documented answer, so we make no claim either way.

For a design guide, Elipson shows how a single shape — a sphere with a reflector — can carry a brand through a collapse and a change of owner. Compare Cabasse, another early French speaker maker that also built a famous sphere, and Triangle. For this guide we use black, a plaster white and a muted red with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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