For the kind of work you're talking about - live remote work in the field? - I've got several pairs of DPA 4006's (one of them is the original B&K 4006 model, WITH the output transformer. They're second ONLY to tghe newer transformerless 4006's, but not by much, honestly.) Various other DPA, Neumann, AT and other nice mics with various patterns for the jobs at hand. (Even some not-so nice mics, too, as long as they do the job. ;-) ) I just don't take out the really old/classic/vintage stuff if I can avoid it. My RCA ribbons have to stay at home, safe and sound.
It's really a blend of reliability, cost factor, and of course - most important - the SOUND (or lack of colorizing) of the mic itself, esp with classical and acoustic music.
Pre's on the high end are Grace m802's and on the low end (but still quite nice) are the Mackie Onyx series with A/D Firewire cards. A/D converters include RME Fireface 800's and other assorted gear (some MOTU, etc.) You have to pick your battles carefully, and assign (or triage!) the gear to the job at hand, esp if you have several events going on at the same time, on the same day.
Everything here these days runs via Firewire into one of several Sony Vaio laptop PCs running VISTA and Sequoia or Samplitude V10. (Still using Win XP SP3 on some machines back at home base, but they all play together very nicely. The overal better networking with Vista is worth the upgrade path alone, IMHO.)
External hard drives are Western Digital (now moving towards the ubiquitous SATA format, vs the ever harder to find IDE drives). Data flows in/out of these via USB 2.0. (Finding it better to keep the incoming recording data on Firewire, and the outgoing storage data on USB 2.0).
I run a CDr for the client or my own anal-nerdy safety concerns, and on top of that to cover all bases, I run a 2-track 24bit safety mix out the SP/DIF ports on the RME Fireface 800 to my M-Audio MicroTrack II with a 4 gig storage chip for ultimate backup.
FWIW, I have stopped lugging UPS's around, since if the power goes off in the building, EVERYTHING stops, not just my mic pre's, and the laptop has a battery to finish the file-saving activity, ditto for the MicroTrack II. Fortunately, it's pretty rare if it happens at all, at least here in the big city. With the cost of gas these days, it's one less thing to haul around.
Live/remote monitoring is usually done with Sony MDR-7506 headphones (rarely is there an iso room for this sort of thing, and although there's a lot of better HP's than these, I know what they're giving me). Other monitors are JBL control 1s, some KRKs, and/or a powered pair of Focals. Otherwise, 90% of the time it's headphones.
Most of all, it's really important to capture everything as cleanly and as accurately as possible out on location, then do the mixing & sweetening back in the studio, where you can hear things better, etc. etc.
