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 t

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.