To Win Trust and Admiration, Fix Your Microphone

This is true but also very complicated. I have tried very expensive microphones and I have tried cheap microphones and which one is better is conditional to location, and deployment.

I use a røde lavalier tieclip which is awesome, and surprisingly cheap. It's also very omni. I had a USB-C enabled podcaster microphone which was awesome and very directional but it also was a giant lump in front of my face in zoom.

On the whole, a tieclip and some minor level setting works, but I just can't control the lawnmower outside and with an Omni, it's leaking in.

getting high Q sound and directionally limited but not in your face in anything but a pro sound studio is hard. I suspect the sound isolation in a studio also has some issues: a certain amount of the real world leaking into your voice isn't a bad thing. "it depends"

also: get trained. My company paid for me to do a course with the Australian Film and Television School and it was delivered by a far north queensland radio professional who was not condescending, not nasty, and very good at explaining how to do speak-to-microphone without a crew to help you. Worth every penny. Oh yea: those "ad hoc" recordings? 99% planning. There is no such thing as ad hoc in the radio, if you can avoid it.

I don't know... I bought an expensive mic with a budget at a prior role, but it kept picking up background noise more than my mac would, and ultimately it's sitting in the garage.

The difficulty of testing, getting feedback, setting audio devices reliably, muting, adjusting settings (my mic had literally 5 different audio forms, all of which picked up too much background noise), etc made it seem like a huge nightmare for potentially inferior results.