This mic is designed to pick up someone who is speaking and it does it very well. I tested it in different scenarios and it performed perfectly in every scenario. In a room where two other people were talking, it picked up my voice clearly and loudly (without maximizing and without distortion) and filtered out the other two to almost inaudible. In a room where music is playing, my voice was picked up loud and clear, and the music was significantly muffled. You can still hear some music, but in the recording it sounds like the music has been turned down a lot. However, this microphone is not flexible for other purposes. You probably don't want to use this mic for singing or recording a musical instrument. Just for illustration, singing with the lapels resulted in a mix of points where my voice is clear and other points where it suddenly muffled my voice as if it were background noise that needed to be eliminated. This happened especially with long-lasting notes. Because the mic is set to pick up a person's speaking voice, I occasionally maxed it out when singing loud and got a moderately distorted sound when singing at full volume. I also tried recording my trumpet out of curiosity and got much the same result as singing out loud - the microphone was maxed out and the result was a heavily distorted sound from the trumpet. Even when I placed the mic across a large room, the trumpet would overwhelm the mic and sound distorted every time. That said, this mic does what it does well, but you don't want to try something like I envisioned here in this review. Hope that helps!