"When I first got my Brauners, I noticed that they seemed to be more sensitive to little noises across the room. With the Schoeps and Brauners both set to the same level for my guitar in front of them, flipping on a light switch across the room made the meters on the Brauner channel jump dramatically, while the Schoeps barely moved."
On or off-axis response is a partial way to understand the reason, but typically off-axis is NOT what you want. The easier and more useful explanation is that the patterns of the two mics differ. The cmc641 has a lot tighter pattern than your Brauner, I'm guessing.
There is a continuum of patterns that begins with the omni and moves through cardioid to figure of eight. Every mic fits somewhere on that continuum, but even two cardioid mics can be on slightly different places on the continuum. One may be a wide cardioid. One may be a tight cardioid.
In addition to that their response may differ both on-axis and off-axis. The cheaper mics tend to be "beamy" which is to say they have non-uniform frequency response peaks at various places and even within the on-axis pattern.
The edge of the pattern is another place where non-linearities may occur. Just as you get to the edge, going from on-axis to off-axis, you can hear nasty little artifacts in the cheaper mics. These are made worse when the mic is used in a slappy, live environment because, typically, there's more sound bouncing around and coming into the mic from off-axis angles.
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