In my videos, I hate the prominence of the mics, so I always work further away. The studio is not an audio studio, but a video studio and around the edge run drapes - there are actually green and blue ones, with a black set over the top - hard floor, hard ceiling, and not a very high one. In some of the videos, the sound of fans could be heard - until I moved the recorder to the office and started it via the network. Now it's silent again, and in some videos, you can hear footsteps on the stairs or the occasional phone ring. If I don't shut the doors, then the railway crossing outside's sirens occasionally intrude, as does a photocopier upstairs. The upshot being that once you stop the space sounding like a box room, then increasing the mic distance evens out levels, stabilises the frequency response when you move and lets the mic capture what it hears. It's just signal to noise - and once the unwanted noises are reduced, few of the mics I've tried are remotely bad. Perhaps four maybe, out of dozens. Most are fine, a few really nice - but loads of them perform pretty strangely used very close - that's where they seem to do odd things. I can hear when I go off-mic, when I look and talk in a new direction. Topics where people talk about sound rarely work, because vocabulary to describe sound is so rubbish. People say "can we hear a clip?" and so many times people just carry on about the XXXXX sound - and we all think different things? My space is quite large, so bass issues are less, so just ordinary drapes do a pretty decent job on reflections.
