In a tribute to Joseph Léon, Édouard Pastor recalled that a visitor to Elipson's Vitry workshop in the 1950s and 1960s might have taken it for a sculptor's studio, with molders working in white plaster dust under glass roofs. The shapes they cast were spheres, eggs and shells, and each had an acoustic job to do. A box speaker has flat walls that face each other, so sound bounces back and forth inside the cabinet, and the sharp edges of the front panel scatter sound on the outside and blur the stereo image. A sphere has no parallel walls and no edges, and its curved shell is naturally stiff. The modern Planet L also puts the tweeter at the center of the main cone, so treble and bass leave from the same point. Trevor Butler of The Ear found the soundstage "much larger than might be thought possible," and a review on 6moons heard images "completely disassociated from the actual diaphragms." Elipson suits listeners who want precise imaging from a speaker that also works as a piece of design.

The Planet L Performance is the place to start. It updates the original Planet L with a new driver and is an easy load for most amplifiers. Give it time, since Elipson asks for at least 100 hours of run-in. The manual suggests some toe-in, but Butler found the dispersion wide enough that he didn't need it, and moving the spheres closer to the wall gave a noticeable bass lift without boom. In bigger rooms, add a subwoofer. Valentin Lefort of Son-Vidéo heard the Performance as brighter than the original and liked it with a Cayin KT88 tube amp. If you prefer a box, the bigger retro Heritage XLS models have front dials to adjust the midrange and treble. Jason Kennedy found a Rega Elex-R "worked a treat" with the XLS 11, and Simon Wilce drove the bigger XLS 15 from a 12-watt tube amp. Kennedy says the 402 Tribute "will let you know a lot about the partnering amplifier," so choose that amp with care.

Elipson began in 1938 as Multimoteur, a maker of electric motors for toys. Its first audio research dates to 1940, and Joseph Léon, an engineer trained at the Arts et Métiers, took charge in 1948. Léon's work centered on reflectors that gathered a driver's sound and spread it evenly across large spaces, and in 1951 the company became Elipson, a contraction of ellipse and son, French for sound. The BS50, a plaster sphere under a reflector, was designed, Elipson says, for the first sound and light show at the Château de Chambord. Elipson speakers played the new electroacoustic music of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, and Kari Nevalainen of Inner Magazines writes that "Elipson is to France what Tannoy is to the UK." The company built studio monitors with the French broadcaster ORTF in the 1960s and the sound system for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble. The 402 of 1966, a 40 cm sphere, carried the idea into French living rooms. The 402 Tribute revives it with drivers from Supravox, which supplied the original.