MKH 8050

8040 & 8050 is my weapon of choice ;)

Once again it depends a lot on what exactly you do. Personally I like the Schoeps MiniCMIT very much. The Sennheiser MKH8060 is exactly as good in my opinion, just a slightly different taste. Bothe are excellent all-rounders outdoors. In some locations a Schoeps MK41 or Sennheiser MKH50 or MKH8050 is still necessary, when dealing with too many reflections (even outside)

Great shootout! One thing I can't wrap my head around tho, is your description of the MKH50. Is it possible that the microphone has some kind of defect? Because I think it's heavy on the proximity, but nothing too outstanding compared to its follower the 8050. It has a very clean and transparent top end if working correctly (I've had a few 50s during the years in my kit). Maybe the membrane is dirty. Also the low freq rolloff works more like a shelf than a cut and imo does a pretty decent job getting rid of the heavy proximity effect (if needed)

I went to a Sennheiser backed mic shootout at a world class studio. I think it was a NARAS meetup. They had all the Neumann mics lined up along with the 8000 series Sennheiser mics. I thought the 102 sounded thin and harsh compared to everything else in the room. Most others there agreed. The most pleasant sounding mic was the M149. The most real sounding mic was the 8000 series Sennheiser. They were much more transparent than the KM184. I’d say on par with the B&K, now known as DPA mics.

You gonna need sensitive mics. So capacitor mic with small diaphragm like neuman km184 or schoeps cmc6. But that’s expensive. You can use shotgun but sometimes it will be difficult to have enough distance in a small room. Sennheiser have good shotgun (mkh series) and it’s cheaper than Neumann KMR or schoeps CMIT. But my best mic advice would be Line Audio CM3 are really cheap and sounds great.