I'd like to challenge the suggestion that the answer to this issue it to place the microphone as high as possible and slightly to the side. I'm a broadcast sound engineer and my experience is that if you place the mic too high then the variation in level can be huge. Imagine a mic placed on the left collar bone. When the speaker is looking left there is probably about 3 to 4 inches between mouth and mic. When they look right this distance doubles to between 6 and 8 inches. This huge variation in distances makes it extremely difficult to balance. My favorite mic position is in the middle of the chest and about 2 to 3 inches below where you might imagine a tie knot to be. Whichever way the speaker moves the distance between mouth and mic only varies by about 15 to 20% (100% in the earlier example). Also the sound is much sweeter...a mic placed too high under the chin tends to sound muddy because the chin masks the high frequencies so it tends to need eq to "brighten" the sound. Another small trick, if the microphone is omni-directional try putting it on "upside down". This shouldn't affect the sound pick up (the mic is an omni), but it will prevent the down flow of air from the nostrils blowing straight down on the mic capsule through the grill.
I hope this helps
Audio Technica makes an exceptional wrap around the ear low profile headset mic that has solved this problem for us. It's not super inexpensive at $300 but it sounds great and is inexpensive compared to other similar products. It's improved our recordings as well as the sound is completely consistent and there's better signal to noise being right next to our pastor's mouth.
Commenting by HaloScan
