Riccardo Yeh plays the guqin, a Chinese zither with more than 2,000 years of history, and he told the YouTube channel Lumerion that its tone changes with the smallest adjustment of a finger or a fingernail. Learning to hear those changes, he says, trained his ear for tuning earphones. Each Forté Ears model is named after a character from opera, and the character sets the tuning. The Macbeth was made for orchestras, opera and acoustic jazz, and Yeh gives its unusual bone conduction drivers only the midrange, the part of the sound our ears are most sensitive to. He credits that choice for its airy, spacious sound. Even the 3D-printed shell is designed to resonate with the music instead of deadening it. Enigma Fotos Reviews heard "realism, realism, realism" in the Macbeth, and Ryan of Skeeb23 called it "phenomenal for vocals." Forté suits listeners who want the scale of a concert hall from an in-ear monitor.

Choose by what you play most. Yeh designed the Macbeth for classical music and the Mefisto for pop, EDM and rock, and he says he boosted the Mefisto's deepest bass a lot. Head-Fi TV summed up the Mefisto as "energy without fatigue," and Enigma Fotos Reviews found its tight mid-bass so good "you can feel it in your body." The same channel likened the Mefisto to being in a small club, while the Macbeth's soundstage is one you can fall into. Yeh says its two small bass drivers keep the Mefisto easy to drive from a dongle or a portable player. Keep the tips it comes with, since Head-Fi TV found the included Eletech Baroque Stage tips integral to its sound. The Macbeth responds to its source, and Ryan and Bree of Skeeb23 heard it turn punchy on the Nunchaku tube dongle, so try it with a tube amp if you have one.

Yeh spent 2013 to 2018 at HIFIMAN, where he gave feedback during the tuning of the HE1000, the Susvara and the Shangri-La. HIFIMAN's founder, Dr. Fang, taught him that good equipment should "turn all the sound into music," and Yeh later told Fang that the Macbeth's mids and treble were modeled on the HE1000 and its bass on the Susvara. Yeh says he once disliked in-ear monitors because everything through them sounded small. Studying other brands' IEMs at Eletech, the cable company he co-founded with Eric Chong, changed his mind, and at the end of 2023 he began work on his own. Chong took Yeh's first prototype, Romeo, to CanJam New York in 2024, and the response there led to the brand. Head-Fi TV tells how the first Macbeth prototype owed its texture to resonances from a rushed 3D print, and the final version added a resonant copper faceplate to bring it back. Guy Lerner of The Headphone List wrote that it had been a while since a brand-new company reached "the top of the tree."