[technofiend]

The booming, echoy audio you get in most zoom calls from people sitting 4 feet from their microphone is a little aggravating. If you'd like to help your colleagues hear you better and want something subtler than a large microphone on a big boom arm then go for a lavalier microphone. See https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/ME4--sennheiser-me-4... for one example, but even a $10 microphone from Microcenter, Amazon or Ali{baba,express} will do. What do you don't want is a microphone hanging off earphone adapters because you end up having to eat those to be heard. A lav mic in Zoom with both auto level adjustment and background noise suppression enabled gives a pretty pleasant experience.

If you don't have a dedicated microphone port then you may have to purchase an adapter because some input ports are wired tip ring ring sleeve (TRRS) and a microphone will just be tip ring sleeve (TRS).

[ravenstine]

I had this exact problem with a client I was working with a couple years ago. For meetings, they would all gather in one cramped room with nothing on the walls and plop a conference mic in the middle, and the audio was so bad that most of the time they were incomprehensible to me. I even told them this, but I pretty much got ignored. Glad I stopped working with them.

It amazes me how, even now with so many people working remote, how few of us take audio without even a modicum of seriousness.

[obsequiosity]

What would you recommend for someone who specifically would want a large mic on an arm? Would that pick up keyboard noise?

[technofiend]

That depends on the pickup pattern of the microphone, the gain on the mic and the distance between the mic and the keyboard.

The pickup pattern dictates which direction(s) the microphone is sensitive to: see https://ehomerecordingstudio.com/microphone-polar-patterns/ as one example. You'd want a cardiod mic turned so that the least sensitive part of the mic faces your keyboard.

Secondly you'll need to get the microphone close to you so you don't need a ton of gain to be heard well. You can put the mic 10 feet from you and with enough amplification people will hear you, but they'll hear every chair squeak and you shuffling your feet and the ac coming on as well. Get it close and you don't have to increase gain nearly as much.

Finally the greater the distance between the mic and keyboard the less likely your tapping will be heard. But again if gain has to be used to pick you up, you're more likely to hear the keyboard even with a cardiod mic because sound still reflects and echoes. Consider something like the Blue snowball as an intro microphone or call up a supplier and have a conversation with a real audio tech, which I am not.

The issue is once you get off into mics then you have to ask yourself which input type(s) do you want, what sort of pre-processing you may want, etc.

Good luck.