That’s something I noticed a while ago: all podcasters have those huge microphones in front of them - sometimes with a gigantic boom - that wouldn’t look out of place on 1950s TV. But unlike in the 1950s, they’re not trying to hide them, no no: the more visible, the bigger, the better.
I can’t figure out the point of that prop. If I did a podcast, I’d try to unclutter the shot myself.
It solves a few problems podcasters have,
ambiant noice; the typical “podcast/radio” microphones are designed to reject pretty much everything besides what is in front of them, and are very good at it (within limits you may not hear the hvac system but you’ll hear a door slam). The closer the microphone is the source(person), the less you have to turn up the volume. When you turn up a microphone’s volume, it’s going to turn up the volume of everything the microphone has captured; background noise, traffic, electrical interfernace, etc. The less you have turn up all the extra crap, the better the sound will be.
multiple people in close promiximity. People sound different, one person might be soft spoken and the other might be loud. In order to hear the quiet person you need to crank their microphone up. If the two people shared a microphone, you’d have to find a balance between loud enough and too loud; ultimately that would lead to a viewer constantly having to adjust their volume depending on who’s speaking or paying an editor to do that.
if the microphones are farther away, the loud person’s voice will get picked up by other people’s mic and will cause strange sounding effects from that person getting picked up by multiple microphones.
consider the primary purpose of a podcast; people talking for a long period of time. Sound quality has to take priority. A news interview gets away with reduced sound quality because it’s for a short period of time, often less than a minute. But if they had us listening to that bad audio for an hour, most people would tune out.
a lot of the problems I mentioned above could be fixed, or at least mitigated, with some audio editing before the episode is published. However, that doesn’t help a live podcast. It also takes a long time, a 1 hour podcast with bad audio could take a day to go through it all; you have to reduce the background noice, balance everyone’s audio, figure out how to make the softspoken person sound good without altering voice too while removing the background noise that’s sometimes just as loud as them. It’s even harder if eveyone is using 1 shared microphone, you end having to make edits everytime the speaker changes or accepting an infeiror product to save time. It’s a hell of alot easier(and cheaper) to just get sound quality right from the start. With that, you might only have spend a little time to make some minor adjustments.
regarding your point 1: that is actually incorrect, take for example the sm7b (the big black tubular “radio mic” that is quite popular among youtubers) it is has a cardoid characteristic, so it basically picks up basically everything to its left and right as well, which is the same pattern as the “default rock mic”, the sm58. the main advantage for those bigger microphones is, that you can make them sound very clear and beautiful with less effort than a smaller (maybe even dynamic) microphone due to its higher sensitivity and more linear frequency response.
It is correct compared to your every day common microphones which are usually omnidirectional.
And it does not pick up “everything” from the right and left: those are a little smaller compared to front.
I am an actual audio engineer…most of their answers are at best an uneducated guess.
Voices that are lower and higher, the listener would have to adjust at home…
Or you know use your gain structure and some gentle compression to normalize the levels.
Most podcasters use a bigger mic because they see others using the Shure Beta or the Elecrivoice RE-20. Any mic would work fine with proper engineering behind it.