Lav mics and boom mics are great because they solve the problem so many other designs are trying hard to work around: distance from the speaker’s mouth to the transducer.
An inexpensive omnidirectional lav can sound good for much less money and much more reliably than complicated software-steered mic arrays or even desktop mics with various pickup patterns can in the hands of an average consumer because the source audio, proportionally, is so much louder than any background or room noises due simply to distance. Because of the inverse-square law, every time you halve the distance between source and mic you get 4 times the acoustic power, so much better signal to noise ratio.
Real situations exist where simply putting the microphone closer to the mouth isn’t good enough to solve the problem on its own, and that’s why stage microphones have those pickup patterns that reject more noise but require some technique to use. That’s not the reality for most people giving a presentation on their laptop, though.
I think so, but I've never tried. I like to move around during calls so for me the ModMic Wireless + my existing Bluetooth headphones was the best option. I don't think there's any system out there that can beat the physical flexibility and ease of use of this setup.
The ModMic comes with a tiny magnetic nub that adheres (permanently) onto the headphones. Then the ModMic itself snaps onto / off of that magnetic element, so it takes literally 2 seconds to take it on/off.
Cheap ($10) lapel microphones from Amazon tend to have extremely acceptable sound quality for me. They tend to record even subsonic frequencies fairly well.
recording the output of my transducer (bass shaker), for one. Of course it's only really perceptible to others with transducers or very good headphones, but having enough output to still sound good enough through a recording is a point of pride for me.
